Mark Powell’s War on Error

Mark Powell finds mistakes everywhere he looks. National monuments, scholarly texts, museums, The Washington Post, The New York Times: All have drawn the attention of Powell's rabid, error-spotting eye. Powell will leave you seven-minute voicemails about these errors. When you call him back, he'll tell you how good he is at finding them--in great detail. When after two and a half hours you finally manage to hang up the phone, you'll vow never to speak with Mark Powell again. Then he'll call, and you'll listen. Because the thing is, Mark Powell is always right.

In an e-mail to Seattle Post-Intelligencer reader representative Glenn Drosendahl, Powell, who resides in Arlington, Va. (he lived in Seattle in 1994 and 1995), wrote: "Give me 'history of cooking' and I won't catch much beyond obvious contradictions; but general history, geography, science, math, politics, the major spheres containing much of what goes in a serious newspaper—my aggregate instant-recall and applicable knowledge in these fields is likely unsurpassed; and ditto the analytical acumen applying it."

The reason Powell contacted Drosendahl in the first place was that he's now turned his fastidious fact-checking ability against longtime P-I film critic William Arnold. Powell says he originally read Arnold's reviews on Yahoo! Movies and was impressed with his analysis. But factually, Powell found much to take issue with, as he claims to have discovered (to date) problems in 18 of the 29 Arnold reviews he's read.

In July, he brought 14 of those errors to the P-I's attention. (He found the others after, as Powell puts it, "communication broke down.") Drosendahl told SW that a handful of Arnold's perceived mistakes were debatable; ultimately, six of Arnold's reviews—of Rocky Balboa, Open Range, Michael Clayton, Cinderella Man, Gods and Generals, and Casino Royale—resulted in editor's notes or corrections confirming the errors Powell pointed out.

Here are a couple of what Powell terms the "super howlers" in Arnold's reviews. In his piece on Cinderella Man, Arnold wrote that Jim Braddock and his family lived in Chicago. They actually lived in New Jersey. This has since been noted online in a correction at the top of the review. In the same review, Arnold wrote that the Braddocks lived in a Hooverville shack. Powell points out that the Braddock home was a basement. Arnold also wrote that Braddock had been "overage" when he made his comeback, four years after his previous fight. Powell notes that Braddock was 28. These blemishes didn't result in editor's notes.

That's not all. In a brief sidebar to his review of the movie Ali, Arnold wrote that Muhammad Ali's nickname was "the Louisville Slugger." It was actually "the Louisville Lip." The P-I acknowledged this error at Powell's behest. In Arnold's review of Gods and Generals, he wrote that the film was based on a book by Michael Shaara, when in fact Shaara's son Jeff was the author. The mistake was subsequently acknowledged in an editor's note at the top of the review.

The editor's notes stop here, but Powell feels there should be more. Here, Powell points to Arnold's statement that Gods and Generals has most of the same actors as Gettysburg (the 1993 movie to which Gods and Generals is the prequel). Online, the word "most" has been changed to "several," but there is no correction acknowledging this change. Some mistakes, Powell says, remain. For instance, Arnold writes that the script of Gods and Generals follows Stonewall Jackson "through the battles of Manassas, Fredericksburg, and other skirmishes leading up to Gettysburg." There were no other "skirmishes" in the film, Powell notes.

Powell says he's never tried to contact Arnold about these perceived mistakes. "I don't have much time for frauds and idiots, and they don't much like my work either," he says. However, he is clear about his thoughts on Arnold in a voicemail left for Drosendahl at 2:49 a.m. PST on Saturday, Aug. 2 (the messages were forwarded to SW by legal counsel for the Hearst Corporation, which owns the P-I):

"I'm not saying that Bill Arnold is Jayson Blair, but the situation is congruent on a smaller size. I'm telling you you have a serious journalistic problem with Bill Arnold."

Arnold failed to return multiple calls seeking a response to Powell's claims.

Arnold is hardly the first journalist to have drawn Powell's ire. In 1995, he sued Frank Blethen and The Seattle Times for $33.33. The Times had killed two op-ed columns Powell had authored, one about Canada and another on Dutch Harbor, Alaska. Powell claimed the money would have represented a reasonable kill fee for the two stories. The Times claimed that they don't normally pay kill fees for op-ed pieces and that no written contract existed to suggest otherwise. The court tossed Powell's case with prejudice. Powell appealed to King County Superior Court, but the judge there also dismissed the case, ruling that the court didn't have jurisdiction since the amount in contention was less than $1,000.

Furthermore, Powell has been such a thorn in The Washington Post's side that the paper has canceled his subscription—for life, he claims. And in late August, Powell wrote to Greg Brock, senior editor in charge of corrections at The New York Times. In his communiqué, Powell points out errors in three film reviews, and then essentially asks for a job: "Whether as fulltime editor or some type of outside associate, I want to find a place, if such exists, where facts, performance and principle outrank politics and personalities—where the best at something can be valued and rewarded for being that, which advances the outlet's mission. I'm advised there is no such place, including the Times. Recent years' general news indicates you're in worse shape in important ways than the Post. But I won't know till I probe there."