Is That The Onion? It Only Seems Like an Onion Parody! It’s the N.Y. Times Corrections Page
We all know the New York Times is going to hell in a handbasket, but it now appears to be a handbasket on gigantic wheels, complete with a 530 hp turbo-charged engine.
What latest affront to journalistic standards has the quondam “newspaper of record” committed? For that I turn to Gregg Easterbrook, the author of the ESPN.com’s weekly NFL season blog, TMQ, Tuesday Morning Quarterback.
Why to Easterbrook? Because his column yesterday performed a task that would try the patience of a saint: he actually studied the corrections pages of the Times for the past six months. For this alone, the man deserves a Pulitzer Prize for public service. Easterbrook’s Calvinist diligence allows the rest of us to soak in the hot-tub of schadenfreude that this fallen giant evokes in many who remember its more centrist days.
Now, the costly leftist rag ($2.50 for a weekday edition — a single copy! — when the far more informative Financial Times costs the same and doesn’t need a corrections page — you can actually depend on the facts you read in it) has unwittingly become the stuff of Onion-eque risibility. No, that’s unfair to a great publication. The Onion is serious. The Times isn’t.
Here are just a few of Easterbrook’s findings and comments on some of the corrections he ferreted out, which, at this rate, will soon engulf an entire section of the birdcage-lining daily to contain the ballooning vastness of just its known mistakes. He reports:
In the last six months the Paper of Record has, according to its corrections page:
• Referred to the former Baltimore Colts quarterback as “Johnny United.”
• Said “millions of Americans” retire each week. At that pace the entire country would be retired by 2013.
• In an article deep inside the paper, said a black hole named Sagittarius A* will swallow the entire Milky Way. A correction reported the black hole threatens only a distant gas cloud: “It is not the case that Sagittarius A* will consume everything in the galaxy.” If a black hole was in fact about to devour the galaxy, shouldn’t that have been on the front page?
• On the same day published four separate corrections concerning the World Series.
• Said the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship that ran aground off Tuscany, carried “half a billion gallons” of fuel. That amount is 45 times the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Correct was half a million.
• Got the wrong title for a theatrical performance that was untitled.
• Confused Snow White with Sleeping Beauty.
• Confused thousands of dollars with millions of dollars — reporter responsible, would you like to be chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee?
• Confused a million dollars and a billion dollars — reporter responsible, would you like to be CEO of Fannie Mae?
• Confused drachmas with euros — reporter responsible, would you like to be finance minister of Greece?
A serious PJM reader might well ask, “Isn’t this like shooting fish in a barrel?” Yes.
A second might ask, “Isn’t it praiseworthy that (a) the Times owns up to its sloppiness and (b) makes the corrections?” No-ish and no. No-ish because there are far more factual errors than the Times ever bothers to correct, so that actual corrections page is but a drop in the mega-vat of errors the newspaper publishes everyday. And no, it isn’t praiseworthy that the newspaper runs the corrections they do because the biggest, most flagrant errors are not those pertaining to individual facts — as egregious as they are — but rather the intentional bias of the entire news coverage by the Times, as reported by TimesWatch, CAMERA (Committee for Middle East Reporting in America), The Catholic League For Religious and Civil Rights, The Daily Caller, Reason.com, MediaMatters.org, BoycottNYTimes.com, inter alia.
Yet another PJM reader might inquire, ”How do errors such as those listed above, as well as hundreds of other factual mistakes, make it into the newspaper in the first place?”
Here’s something you might want to think about. You can’t run a complex 21st century society with the kind of simple minded people who run things these day. The headline about the Daytona 24 hour sports car race said “Unhealed team wins Daytona 24″ I think they meant Unheralded.
Well, f1guyus, I suspect the members of that team were rather tired and sore by the time the race ended, and most likely had some injuries as well. So “unhealed” may not have been that inaccurate…
There’s a big difference between a simple typo or typesetting error like that and confusing the Wicked Witch of the West with Cindarella…
Cinderella. Not Cindar. Typos are easy, aren’t they?
The end result of worthless journalism degrees procured at Indoctrination U. for $100,000 where they learned from their 60′s radical profs that no facts exist, only interpretations; no truth exists, only narratives; and no other narrative exists, except for the neo-Marxist-Nietszchean one.
“Confused Snow White with Sleeping Beauty.”
OMG!
Snow White was a lot hotter. Didn’t sleep all the time, either.
“One MILLION dollars!”
–Dr. Evil
You know, I don’t think even the Onion could run a headline like “Black Hole Swallows Universe, and Nobody Noticed”.
Fiction has to be believable.
“Black Hole Swallows Universe. Women And Minorities Hardest Hit.”
You beat me to the punchline!
FEMA slow to respond, Bush widely blamed.
Remember, 9 out of 10 dogs prefer the editorial page to poop on. They recognize crap when they see it.I think it’s the same with caged birds. Not sure.
Newspaper, especially the worthless NYT, is not safe even for our bird. The ink is toxic, at least by what I’ve heard, so if the bird can get at it, well, he’ll be the canary in the mind [sic].
“Mine”, not mind. (as in mineshaft)
It’s a joke, Jake!
Well, PTL, I did refer to the NYT as a” birdcage-lining daily,” but that was before I’d read Dean from Ohio’s comment on the toxicity of the newspaper’s ink. I’d wager your figures on the percentage of dogs preferring the editorial page is, if anything, a conservative estimate.
Well, I do recall that a few years ago some popular science-type magazine … Science, New Scientist, or perhaps American Scientific, I can’t remember which … published a headline on their web page of an online article on a recently updated estimate of the age of the universe. You guessed it, they were off by three orders of magnitude in their reporting. As I recall, they corrected the article and its headline within 24 hours — without any acknowledgment that they made an error. Of course, fixing a web page is much easier than recalling several thousand copies of print, so they could get away with that.
Daily Duranty headlines, if truth was an intended goal:
Information black hole swallows entire small c communist universe.
Michael Moore swallows whole … Sean Penn…, passes an Oliver Stone. Results are what you see on today’s front page. We call it Idiot ink.
If Jayson Blair knew there was a corrections page, he would be editor in chief today.
What amazes is that other media are so willing to rely and post articles “according to the New York Times” or the “Washington Post” for that matter. Whether they do this to be cynical or self-destructive, I’m not sure. I merely stop reading the article and not bother wasting my time with media source.
Had to get a morbid chuckle from this blazingly accurate assessment of the situation though. Thanks.
couldn’t agree with you more Ypip. I too quit reading as soon as I see those citations
Hey, what’s a few facts? They’ve got more important journalist concerns, they’re trying to get the Kenyan reelected!
Maybe the black hole eating the galaxy started with the NYT ?
Layers of editors and fact checkers.
Newsprint is made from soy and is not toxic for your bird, although the dishonesty of the NYT’s reporting may make him angry.
I thought the galaxy was going to be swallowed by a giant space goat…
We don’t need any stinkin’ fact-check, we KNOW everything, we have read Das Kapital.
By Groucho Marx.
few things make my blood boil more than today’s subject. I totally agree with Ypip’s assessment and like him/her I quit reading when I see the NYT or WP trumpeted as the source. And yes don’t insult the Onion
“…all 50 of the United States of America, as well as the world at large will become entirely dependent for its news on PJ Media.
Worse things could happen.”
Yes, we could become dependent on Fox News. Conservatives, who used to be a source of light and a breath of fresh air, have now become nattering nabobs of negativity.
seems to me a lot of “news” papers just reprint AP (Adore Palestinians) articles word for word and only edit the headlines (normally to make Israel look bad) knowing the headlines is all many people will even look at.
Rueters is not much better- having been proved in French courts to be manipulators and creators of fake news and all to eager to reprint Pallywood productions without question.
Besides the obvious biases in these rags- the editing is atrocious- seems that editors no longer read the articles- spelling and grammatical errors abound.
I used to be a loyal reader of newspapers, so glad I can get internet news instead, and research my own topics, and no black-inked fingers to smudge my furniture and clothing. Loving instant feedback, no typing, printing, stamps, no waiting to see if my letter gets published.
Ahem- “spelling and grammatical errors abound.”
Rueters => Reuters
All to eager => all too eager
Just sayin’
Of the five reasons you state for the volume and nature of the Times’s errors, the only one rooted in reality is No. 4. The loss of talent and experience in the last few years at the paper has been catastrophic. The dwindling ad revenue can no longer support a fully qualified staff of reporters and editors.
As the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Everyone is entitled to his opinion, but not to his own facts.” I fact-checked all five causes with impeccable sources before this was published and all five are accurate facts..
I’ve actually been a copy editor and fact checker, and I was a good one. I didn’t get paid all that much. It affects the bottom line very little to hire decent copy editors and fact checkers. In this day of electronic transmission, they need not live in NYC.
Any publisher or media outlet that doesn’t hire copy editors and fact checkers is displaying a reckless disregard for the truth – not just in one story, but across the board.
Our Craven and Seditious Mainstream Media
Maybe if they stopped their far left biased lies / BS their ad revenues would increase.
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson
I’ve seen many cases where the NYT corrects a detail that was anti-Israel (loosely speaking) in the original article. So I have to hand them that. Of course, the real thanks go to the watchdogs out there who know their facts. I can imagine the NYT Corrections Guy reluctantly making the correction. This got me wondering. Has it ever happened that a detail in an article was anti-Palestinian (again, loosely speaking), and the NYT had to correct it? (I’d like to jokingly answer that they never write anything against the Palestinians, but they actually do, in small amounts.) Or are the anti-Palestinian details basically always accurate? My guess is yes.
Yet, these media twits want a monopoly on political discourse. That’s why they’re pushing this outfit called MoveToAmend.org to get the Citizens united ruling overturned.
I think when they said a million people retired-each week , they were unwittingly referring to the unemployed who are no longer looking for jobs in the Obama economy.
“soak in the hot-tub of schadenfreude”
nice turn of phrase.
We get these TV ads for the Sunday Times and they’ve got all these slim, hip yuppie types saying things like “They’ve got the best reporters in the world… there’s no debating that!”.
Riiiighhht.
Delighted you appreciated “soak in the hot-tub of schadenfreude.”
Far (very far) be it from me to play the devil’s advocate here, but what those cloying, metrosexual-directed ads could be interpreted as saying is that at The New York Times itself, “there’s no debating that” because it’s impermissible to think otherwise. And out in the real world — you know, the one they claim to “cover” — that one —where you and I live, there’s no debating it, either. What’s to debate? It’s just plain wrong. You can’t debate a fact, only an opinion. So, as much as it pains me to suggest it, that silly ad may contain a scintilla of truth, after all.
And you have hit on the defining characteristic of liberalism. Libs never argue facts. they only argue feelings. So if you disagree with them, they regard you as a)venal b) naive c)stupid d) misanthropic e)racist f)bigoted g)homophobic h) whatever they think they aren’t. they regard themselves as quixotic champions of the undertrod, the victims, the disenfranchised. To say anything that disturbs their narcissistic, smug, supercilious self concept is to attack the basis of their lives. No matter how much a ‘fact’ is disproved, they will cling to it because it ‘feels’ right to them.
If I was able to run the country, I would use the Times as my information resource. I would use Krugman as my economics source primarily. See, I would do the exact opposite of everything in the paper.
There would be a revival unimagined in the US.
Thousands, millions, billions. All those zeros get confusing.