In Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, a classic satire of daily news, two rival newspapers — the Daily Beast and the Daily Brute — compete for the perfect story and end up manufacturing a war. Recent history has shown that front page stories can feature fabrications and omissions even more outrageous than those imagined by Waugh. While the papers in Scoop crafted a made-for-print war, the New York Times, from its high pulpit, ran reports of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, lending credence to the Bush administration’s arguments in favour of the invasion of Iraq and facilitating a real war. Perhaps equally shocking, Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader ran a cursory correction in 2004 apologizing for having “neglected to cover the civil rights movement.”

Craig Silverman’s Regret the Error focuses on the reasons for such errors and offers solutions to increase accuracy. The book is in effect a paean to fact checking and sound journalism, and it deserves to join Waugh’s seminal work atop every journalism school syllabus — and on the desk of every reporter and editor. By examining the history of media errors and corrections, the book paints a picture of a fallible mass information machine. Silverman argues that mistakes, no matter how inconsequential, erode public trust in the news media, which in turn poses a threat to society (by misinforming it) and free speech (by inviting restrictions on reporting). And in the age of a twenty-four-hour, instant news cycle, with the media under scrutiny from both the public and watchdog groups, accuracy has become more important than ever.

Sadly, however, Silverman finds that fact checking is in decline, with magazines phasing it out and newspapers mostly unable to afford the time. As publishers and editors increasingly focus on the bottom line and the juiciest headline, they inadvertently endanger the media’s credibility. In the face of this retreat, Regret the Error is a much-needed call for careful journalism and accountability.