The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
News You Can Use
“Cement’s Basic Molecular Structure Finally Decoded”–headline, MIT press release, Sept. 9
NOTE: The excerpt below is from the Aug. 3 BOTW archives
Times Reporter Exposed in Times Exposé
Last month the New York Times published an astonishing 200-word correction of seven factual errors in an “appraisal” of the late Walter Cronkite. We noted it last Monday under our usual cheeky headline “Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate.”
Now Clark Hoyt, “public editor” of the Times, has weighed in with a 1,200-word column about the 200-word correction. Hoyt’s report is both thorough and scathing. He tracked down the source of each error and even reported on how the paper avoided putting other possible errors into print. He calls the correction “especially embarrassing” and says it threatens to “undermine the authority of a newspaper.” He quotes the paper’s culture editor as calling the story “a disaster, the equivalent of a car crash.” As embarrassing as it was, that seems an overstatement.
Hoyt is especially hard on Alessandra Stanley, author of the corrected article:
A television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not. . . . . For all her skills as a critic, Stanley was the cause of so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts. Her error rate dropped precipitously and stayed down after the editor was promoted and the arrangement was discontinued. Until the Cronkite errors, she was not even in the top 20 among reporters and editors most responsible for corrections this year. Now, she has jumped to No. 4 and will again get special editing attention.
That kind of reporting must be great for newsroom morale! But does it enhance the Times’s credibility? Perhaps. It’s hard to argue that a paper that would print Hoyt’s merciless dissection of its own foul-ups is an arrogant institution unwilling to admit error. On the other hand, there is such a thing as too much information. Does the public really have a right to know that the Times has a top 20 list of error-prone reporters? And if it does, why not go whole hog and tell us Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 5 through 20?
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.
