By Paull Carrier
Having worked as a newspaper reporter for three decades until I retired a few years ago, I’m not one for the media bashing that is so popular nowadays, particularly among ill-informed malcontents who use “mainstream media” as a pejorative term.
But I’m sympathetic to the oft-heard claim that people become suspicious of the media when they come across inaccurate news stories on topics they know something about. If “they” got things wrong about this, the thinking goes, how can I trust what “they” say about anything else?
In my experience, most reporters bend over backwards to get things right. But journalists, believe it or not, are human. This means two things. First, even top-notch reporters make mistakes despite their best efforts, for a whole host of reasons. Second, some journalists are more conscientious than others, just like people in any other profession.
All that being said, it is disconcerting to encounter inaccurate reporting, whatever the cause. Take the case of Hermione. No, not Hermione Granger. I’m talking about the frigate Hermione, which is a replica of the ship that carried Lafayette to America in 1780, during the American Revolution.
L’Hermione recently sailed across the Atlantic, with ports of call all along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. As I write this, she’s docked in Castine, Maine, with an upcoming stop scheduled in Nova Scotia before she returns to France.
The frigate’s American visit has generated a fair amount of news coverage, some of which contained historical inaccuracies. It has been reported, for example, that Lafayette bought or built L'Hermione for his journey, when in fact she was a French naval vessel.
Some news stories have implied that Lafayette’s voyage aboard L’Hermione marked his initial trip to America, which also is untrue. He first arrived in 1777 aboard La Victoire, joined the Continental Army, and later returned to France to seek additional support for the Revolution. He boarded L’Hermione to rejoin the Continental Army.
Perhaps the most egregious error I’ve seen in news stories states, or implies, that Lafayette came to America in 1780 with news that France finally had decided to assist the Revolution. In fact, France recognized the United States in 1778, and participated in unsuccessful joint Franco-American campaigns to capture Newport, R.I., in 1778 and Savannah, Ga., in 1779. When Lafayette returned from France aboard L’Hermione in 1780, he was carrying the glorious news that still more French aid was on the way, not that France was entering the war. And, no, Lafayette did not cram thousands of French troops and a fleet of ships aboard L'Hermione, as some news stories implied. The reinforcements arrived later.
In the grand scheme of things, these are relatively small errors in coverage of a relatively small event. I don’t read too much into it, or draw sweeping conclusions from it. Some of the news stories I read, or saw on TV, were entirely accurate. But whenever consumers of news spot errors in the reporting of news, it does give pause.
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