October 2013

 Uncommon Sense with Wong Chin Huat: On the “Allah” judgement (Corrected 11.25pm, 21 Oct 2013)

We mistakenly referred to “west coast Peninsular Malaysia” as “west coast Malaysia” in three sentences in Dr Wong Chin Huat’s column. That was an editing error caused by being too peninsula-centric. Wong had originally written “west coast Malaya” which was then edited to become “west coast Malaysia”. As has been pointed out by Wong, “west coast Malaya” cannot be edited to be “west coast Malaysia” because Sabah has a west coast, too.

We apologise for our error in editing.

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Wishing for another 13 May (Corrected 11.55am, 2 Oct 2013)

Columnist Jacqueline Ann Surin mistakenly wrote that in the 1969 general election, the Alliance held “a slim two-seat majority” that resulted in  “feelings of anger, frustrations and anxiety within the local Umno branches”. She had gleaned that information from an article by Dr Wong Chin Huat, Wathershed elections of 1969, which had originally been published by theSun newspaper.

After reader Michael Lim pointed out a discrepancy in the figures, Surin checked in with Dr Wong again. Dr Wong has apologised for the error he made in his writing that resulted in Surin’s mistake in her column. Here is Dr Wong’s explanation for how the error occurred: “My apologies over an error in data. In this 2007 article published by theSun, I had misrepresented the total number of seats in the Selangor state legislature, putting it at 24 (the number of seats won by the Alliance in 1964) rather than 28. This led to the wrong conclusion that the Alliance held a slim margin of two seats in Selangor when it was actually a hung legislature (Alliance 14, DAP 9, Gerakan 4, Independent 1).”

The Nut Graph thanks reader Lim for keeping us accountable and accurate. And we apologise for not double checking the figures before publishing Surin’s column.