The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal’s “Best of the Web” at WSJ written by the editor, James Taranto.
After Casing the Joint
“Former Meat Worker Accused of Stealing Sausage”–headline, KABB-TV website (San Antonio), Aug. 24
Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate
- “An earlier version of this article referred to hitchBot as male. The robot was gender neutral.”—Los Angeles Times, Aug. 3
- “An article on Sunday about the ferocious start to the fire season in the West misstated, in some editions, the amount of land in the United States that was destroyed by wildfires last year. It is 3.6 million – not billion – acres.”—New York Times, Aug. 4
Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate
- “An earlier version of this column said that Hillary Rodham Clinton makes five times the average American’s annual income. She makes that amount per speech.”—Los Angeles Times, Aug. 11
- “Karol Wojtyla was referred to in Saturday’s Credo column as ‘the first non-Catholic pope for 450 years.’ This should, of course, have read ‘non-Italian.’ We apologise for the error.”—Times (London), Aug. 11
Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate
“An earlier version of this review, in discussing Mario Vargas Llosa’s relationship with Isabel Preysler, stated that Vargas Llosa announced the relationship on a Twitter account and that he sold related photographs and an ‘exclusive’ story to Hola!, a popular Spanish magazine, for a large amount of money. After the review was published, Vargas Llosa contacted The Times to say that none of these assertions were true. In reviewing this complaint, editors determined that the reviewer had based his account of these matters mostly on information from an article about Vargas Llosa in The Daily Mail, but neither the reviewer nor editors independently verified those statements. Using such information is at odds with The Times’s journalistic standards, and it should not have been included in the review.”—New York Times, Aug. 23
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.” (Note: The excerpts above are from the BOTW archives for August, 4, 12 and 31.)
