Somewhere in the last decade we decided that changing one's mind was a form of weakness, and that the only respectable opinion was the one held instantly and defended forever. This is a strange thing for a species that got everywhere it has ever got by being wrong and then being slightly less wrong. It is a particularly strange thing for journalism, a trade whose entire claim to seriousness rests on the willingness to say, in print, that yesterday's version was mistaken.
The correction used to be a small humiliation, set in tiny type at the foot of a page. I want to argue for the opposite: that the correction is the most honest thing a newspaper does, and that a culture which has lost the habit of the slow, public second thought has lost something it will miss.
Consider the alternative we have built. The reward now goes to the fastest reaction — the take posted before the facts are in, the certainty performed rather than earned. Speed has become a proxy for conviction, and conviction a proxy for truth, when the three have never had much to do with one another. The slowest voice in any argument is now assumed to be the least sure, when it is at least as likely to be the most careful.
A newspaper cannot fix the wider culture, and should be suspicious of any that claims it can. But it can model something better in its own pages: the correction issued without defensiveness, the follow-up that complicates the story it told last week, the willingness to return to a subject and admit it was harder than the first version allowed. These are not failures of nerve. They are the whole point.
I have changed my mind about a great many things over the years, usually too slowly, occasionally in public. I have never once regretted the slowness. The regrets are all on the other side — the times I was fast, and certain, and wrong, and had to be reminded that the second thought was always available and I had simply been too proud to take it.