Admit when you're wrong

By now, everyone's heard about the M. Night Shyamalan-like twist at the end of last night's Academy Awards ceremony.La La Land won! No, wait, it's really Moonlight! (Yay Moonlight! Totally deserved.)It's very easy for us to make fun of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway - or of the person who handed Warren the wrong envelope.But Warren actually came back on stage to apologize and explain what happened. And La La Land Producer Jordan Horowitz  insisted on handing the award directly to the true winners and showed the world the card that proclaimed Midnight's win.This isn't to lionize either Beatty or Horowitz, though the latter showed grace that too many lack in even less embarrassing moments. And this isn't to castigate anyone involved in the error. While it's easy to say that this is one place an error should never be made - and that's quite true, this award is the pinnacle of achievement in the film industry - let those of us who've never committed a grave error throw the first stone.The way to handle it is to just stand up and say, "Wow. I screwed up. I was wrong."Shortly after I started covering growth and development for the East Valley Tribune, a newspaper in suburban Phoenix, I covered a joint meeting of the Planning and Zoning Board and the City Council of Apache Junction (best town name ever?). I think those were the two governing bodies; it's been a few years, so I might have that detail wrong. I hadn't met these folks before, and they didn't have nameplates in front of them.I had all their names on a meeting agenda, so I would be sure to spell them correctly. Toward the beginning of the meeting, one person's name was said. For some reason, I assumed all the folks from one of the boards were sitting together and the folks from the other board were sitting together on the other half of the dais. Someone else's name was said and confirmed my beliefs.Like I said, this was a long time ago, so I am a bit hazy on the details. But whatever the case, I ended up attributing several comments to the wrong people because they were mixed together and I never bothered asking anyone afterwards to confirm. In my defense, if you've ever covered a planning and zoning meeting, you'd know that being awake by the end is a feat in and of itself.The plain truth, though, is that when I wrote up my article, I got it wrong. As soon as a city official called me to tell me, my stomach sank. For most journalists - despite what you hear these days - getting something wrong is the worst thing you can do. In my first class in journalism school, the mantra, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out" was drummed into our heads. Take nothing for granted and make sure you get it right, period.I marched into the Managing Editor's office and told him what happened, apologized, said I was going to write up a correction immediately and it wouldn't happen again.Trust me, that's the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to hide it, to not tell anyone and pretend like I did nothing wrong.But I didn't.I'm crushed for the Moonlight folks who didn't get their proper moment to shine. That can never be recovered. But the immediate correction of the error is important. Admitting we're wrong is always hard. We've gotta do it, though.Photo by Russell Davies via Flickr Creative Commons.