media culpa

n.

An admission of a mistake or misjudgment by a member of the media.

Example Citation:

A heart-felt media culpa is in order to alert readers Tina McGinnis of Livermore and Wayne Rowe of Benicia. They pointed out that the would-be owl assassin in Dublin, Alan Rondi, used a slingshot, not a rifle, as I reported.

—Sam McManis, "Orinda Women Trump Illness Through Bridge," The San Francisco Chronicle, November 24, 2000

Earliest Citation:

And now once more, in the interests of a clean slate, a fresh start and a genuinely new year, it is time for my annual Media Culpas. This has become a rite of passage for me, a cleansing confession of the errors of my way through the past year.

— Ellen Goodman, "It's media-culpa time again," The Boston Globe, December 29, 1988

Notes:

The originator of this phrase was probably Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, who has been running an annual Media Culpa column since 1988 (in prior years, she used the phrase mea culpa, instead).

Media culpa is a play on the Latin phrase mea culpa, "a formal apology or acknowledgment of wrongdoing or guilt"; literally "(through) my fault."

Related Words:

anniversary journalism

civic journalism

culture of confession

Danny Boy

horse-race journalism

notebook dump

Oprahization

Category:

Media and Journalism