Accountability is an important part of ethical journalism. SPJ’s Code of Ethics has a section on the topic, and encourages journalists to “Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.”

Reasonable people can debate “promptly.”

Hours? A day? Two? A week?

I’ve read about The New York Times dragging its feet and running a correction months later.

But that’s drag-racing speed compared to what Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander revealed in Sunday’s column (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/20/AR2009032002272.html)

Alexander wrote that a few requests for corrections have gone unanswered since 2004. The paper’s backlog of correction requests, he wrote, is in the hundreds, stuck as if in a black hole.

Alexander does a great service by showing that one of The Post’s procedure for accountability is failing.

I rarely hurry to this blog to make an immediate comment, but I felt the need while watching CBS News anchor Katie Couric interviewed by David Letterman a few minutes ago. Couric talked about how exciting it was to be part of an off-the-record White House lunch with President Obama and several other news anchors and Sunday talk show hosts. The president told the group some things off the record and other things on background. Later, on a broadcast, you can’t quote his exact words, Couric explained, but you can paraphrase him, using attribution such as “someone very close to the president – wink wink.” Here, she laughed, as if the deception were funny. It’s far too easy to ruin our credibility – the reason people trust us – by playing loose with the facts. Remember Judith Miller going along with Scooter Libby’s charade and agreeing to call him a “former Hill staffer”? While accurate in one sense, it was intentionally misleading to throw readers off the trail of the truth. Lest we forget, our duty is to our readers, listeners and viewers. We should be judicious in granting anonymity and we should do our best to explain why it was necessary. Put aside the question whether network anchors should be letting the president go off the record in this way. Does Couric think “someone very close to the president” is truthful to her audience? Let’s hope she was telling a joke that was bad in a way she didn’t understand. But I also remember another Couric episode that put her in a bad light. An item pilfered from The Wall Street Journal was posted on Couric’s CBS News blog. She read the piece as if she were sharing her own thoughts. Furthermore, a CBS producer had posted the item on her behalf, as if Couric had written it. Enough, please. We expect integrity and honesty from a network news anchor.