Don’t shoot the messenger. Or, more specifically, don’t blame a journalist when their fact-checked article ends up ruffling a few feathers. But that goes hand in hand with something else: if you make a mistake as a journalist, you have to own up to it.
Our May break had just begun when Minister Bruins responded to parliamentary questions from his own party, NSC. They were up in arms over a piece in de Nieuwe Ster about UM resuming its recruitment of international students. The original article had been published by Observant on 10 March and picked up by de Nieuwe Ster later that same day.
NSC MP Heite questioned whether UM’s actions were in line with the government’s aim of reducing the number of international students in the Netherlands. Shouldn’t the minister call UM to account? No, said Bruins in late April; UM’s recruitment efforts in the Euregion are focused on two programmes, Brain Science and Regenerative Medicine and Technology – both technical healthcare programmes with a clear need for graduates in the job market.
Mistake
But Sustainable Bioscience – the third programme mentioned in Observant – was a different matter, the minister said. The programme has not yet been accredited and is therefore not allowed to recruit students yet. According to Bruins, its inclusion in the article had been a mistake.
A mistake? But we had it in writing: an email from the Executive Board’s spokesperson stated that the university would be recruiting for Sustainable Bioscience. Typical, I grumbled to myself – blaming the press when a story causes a stir elsewhere (on the national political stage, in this case). But we’d got the information straight from the source.
Another mistake
After going over the minister’s remarks again, we called UM’s spokesperson. He held up his hands straight away: yes, it was a mistake – but he’d sent Observant a follow-up email to correct it, a week after the article went online and three days after the parliamentary questions were asked.
Ouch – we missed that second email. As a result, the online article wasn’t updated (the print edition had already been out for several days). That was our mistake. We’ve now corrected the post on our website.