Newspaper Corrections Run Amok With Trivia
posted on September 4, 2009 at 6:55 am
Michael Kinsley writes a column on the over-zealous approach to correcting errors in the New York Times. It’s not that interesting, although his basic gist is that they should lay off a little (e.g., correcting “William and Mary College” to “The College of Williams & Mary.”)
But, this last graph is good:
Last month, in an already legendary correction, the Times apologized for seven factual errors in a single article. It was a eulogy of Walter Cronkite, and it had errors such as misspelling Telstar as Telestar and misstating the date of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The Times’s ‘Public Editor’ wrote a column piling on, in which he noted the irony that Cronkite was ‘famed for his meticulous reporting.’ He was? I don’t think Cronkite did any reporting at all during the period of his fame. What he was famous for was reading a teleprompter. But that is one correction you’ll never see.
Ha!
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