Is Bevan Shields' acknowledgement of error too little too late?

And is Peter Costello's role at Nine Entertainment the bigger problem?

Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, Bevan Shields, has finally deigned to publicly acknowledge the mistakes he and his newspaper made in their initial coverage of the recent industrial action at NSW Rail.

At 5.17 on Friday March 4—eleven days after the event and at a time that many journalists recognise as the preferred period in which politicians release news they wish to see buried or ignored—Shields published a “Note from the Editor” in which he finally addressed, sort of, what went wrong.

It takes him more than three-hundred words of praise for what he sees as some of the good journalism they have done to finally get to the bad journalism “acknowledged” in the headline, and if, by this stage, you are sensing a certain level of reluctance to confront what happened, then I think you might be right.

Having said that, let’s acknowledge that this is better late than never.

Let us also acknowledge that he makes a perfectly valid point that the SMH was not alone in misleading their audience…