yanoblog

Yesterday, I blogged about David Brooks’ latest error and wondered when the correction would come.

Well, it looks like they won’t be openly correcting it – it’s been silently changed in the Times archive.

Whatta schmuck.

There is precedent for having columnists openly correct their mistakes.

For example, a few years ago, Frank Rich wrote an article about the Pentagon’s desecration of the Koran. It clearly enraged the White House. But the only error they could find was a misstated date. This led to one of the finest snarky corrections ever. Read it slowly to really appreciate it:

Last week I misstated the Friday evening on which the Pentagon buried its report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards. It was June 3, not May 27.

In fact, even David Brooks has done it. He wrote a rant about Spain’s decision to pull out of Iraq. It included this paragraph:

Does anyone doubt that Americans and Europeans have different moral and political cultures? Yesterday the chief of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, told Italy’s La Stampa, ’’It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists.’’ Does he really think capitulation or negotiation works better? Can you imagine John Kerry or George Bush saying that?

While it might be a reasonable approach to consider the context in which terrorists act (as well as what gets defined as “terrorism”), I can’t even imagine Prodi saying that. Because he didn’t. Brooks issued this correction:

In Tuesday’s column I quoted the European Commission’s president, Romano Prodi, telling the Italian newspaper La Stampa that force was not the answer to terrorism. I was relying on an Agence France-Presse translation, which was incorrect. Prodi actually said force should not be the only answer to terrorism. He said terrorism would not abate until the Israeli-Palestinian dispute was resolved.

(Not that that causes Brooks to revisit any of his actual arguments.) But at least he issued a correction.

What gives this time? (Maybe it’s coming with his next column. But the Times usually appends its corrections on the website. It doesn’t just silently change the original article. We’ll see…)

UPDATE

Once again, my blog’s influence grows. With his next column, Brooks issued a formal correction. A correction has also since been added to the archived version of this column (which should’ve been done when they changed the column silently).

I just have one correction today. But it may win the award for most mistakes in a single article. (Maybe that’s not the right metric – it should probably be mistakes-per-column-inch.) Witness:

An article in the Arts & Leisure section last Sunday about the No Music Day campaign in Britain included several incorrect references to Muzak, the company that sells prerecorded background music. Muzak is not distributed in the United Kingdom, and lobbying groups there are not protesting the company; they are against piped music. Many musicians there oppose piped music; all practicing musicians do not “tend to despise Muzak.” The pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim joined in the protests last year, but he did not angrily denounce Muzak. A group leading the campaign, Pipedown International, is against all forms of background music; it has not been campaigning against Muzak for 15 years. And a bill currently in Parliament and promoted by Pipedown seeks to ban piped music; it does not call for banning Muzak in hospitals. (Go to Article)

Sadly, the article has been updated to reflect the corrections, which I had thought they didn’t do.

Enjoy!

There have been a few corrections recently worth of note.

The first is amazing because it appears to completely undermine the point of the original story (I love those). Oh yeah, it also took three weeks to show up:

An article on Oct. 14 about Angola’s persistent poverty despite its financial windfall from rising oil prices misstated, in some editions, the country’s daily oil production. It is 1.5 million barrels, not 2 billion. (Go to Article)

This caused me to wonder if there were other similar errors for Angola (oil corrections will be a different post). There aren’t. But, there here’s an interesting one. From 1994:

A picure caption yesterday about the civil war in Angola referred incorrectly to an examination being performed on a crying child. He was being weighed and measured as part of a nutritional analysis, not measured for a coffin. The Gamma Liaison agency, which provided the picture and the description, said the erroneous account originated with an “overzealous editor” at a British newspaper that published the picture earlier this year, and was inadvertently attached to a print in Gamma’s files.

The next two are only good because they are a pair. Apparently, the shake-up at Citigroup is also throwing the Times photo department for a loop as well. From two days ago:

A picture yesterday with the continuation of a front-page article about the challenges facing Citigroup’s new leadership was published in error. The person shown with Citigroup’s new chairman, the former Treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin, was Manfred Bischoff, supervisory board chairman of Daimler — not Winfried F. W. Bischoff, the head of Citigroup Europe, who will become Citigroup’s interim chief executive. (Go to Article)

And now from today:

A picture in the Today in Business column in Business Day yesterday with a brief report about an executive change at Time Warner was published in error. The picture was of Charles O. Prince III, the departing chief executive of Citigroup — not Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the newly chosen chief executive of Time Warner.

Oh, how I hope there’s another one tomorrow. Enjoy!

On Friday, the Times printed a correction that reminded me of another one from a couple of years ago (which is on our fridge – I don’t have photographic memory). This one is also now on our fridge. It is a one-letter error which is only interesting because of the bipartisan drive to attack Iran. From Saturday,, a vision of things to come:

An article on Monday about the goals and priorities of Adm. Mike Mullen, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, misidentified a country where American troops have been serving lengthy deployments. It is Iraq, not Iran. (Go to Article)

Back in January 2005, the Times ran this correction:

An article yesterday about concerns among senior members of Congress that the Pentagon overstepped its bounds by creating new secret battlefield intelligence units within the Defense Intelligence Agency referred incorrectly to one of two countries where Congressional officials said such activities were appropriate in current wartime situations. The countries are Afghanistan and Iraq, not Iran.

So, this got me thinking, how many times has that same error been made? (The following searches are from 1981 to today). “Iraq, not Iran” appeared 6 times since 1993 (its first occurence) in the Times corrections section. (Iran, not Iraq has appeared 7 times). So, I started wondering, what are some of the other corrections about Iran in the Times?

Many of them are amusing. Some are revealing about Times production methods (mislabeled maps – are they being laid out by hand?!?). Here are some of the best:

From October 2, 2004, when the candidates were arguing over who could do a better job occupying Iraq and attacking Iran:

The main front-page article in late editions yesterday about the presidential debate on Thursday night misidentified one of two countries that President Bush and Senator John F. Kerry viewed as a potential nuclear threat—an issue for which they offered conflicting solutions. The countries were North Korea and Iran, not Iraq. In some editions, the article also reversed the directions from which President Bush and Senator Kerry walked onstage. Mr. Bush entered from stage left (or the audience’s right) and Mr. Kerry from stage right.

From the it’s-hard-keeping-track-of-which-country-were-painting-as-the-next-Hitler’s-Germany file:

An article yesterday about an agreement between Iran and the United States to hold talks about the violence in Iraq referred incorrectly in some copies to the country whose nuclear program has been referred to the United Nations Security Council for possible punitive action. It is Iran, not Iraq.

Ah, Dick:

An article yesterday about an interview Vice President Dick Cheney gave aboard his military transport on Tuesday, for which he asked to be identified only as a senior administration official but then spoke in the first person about his discussions with the Pakistani and Afghan presidents, truncated the final passage in some copies. It should have read: On Iran, the administrations highest-ranking and best-known hawk challenged a questioner who suggested that oil prices might drop 10 or 15 percent if the United States took off the table the option of a military strike against Irans nuclear facilities. I dont buy it, the senior administration official said, before retreating to his cabin.

This one is less funny from a political standpoint, and more just funny in an “oh yeah, that make more sense” way:

A news analysis article on Saturday about a civilian nuclear energy accord between the United States and India misstated the route of a proposed natural gas pipeline that India is negotiating with Iran, which has been criticized by the United States. The pipeline would run from Iran through Pakistan to India—not from Iran through Pakistan and back to Iran.

From August 27, 2007, 27 years into the lack of Iranian embassies in the US:

Because of an editing error, an article on Wednesday, about the release of the Iranian-American academic Haleh Esfandiari from an Iranian prison on bail, misstated how Lee H. Hamilton, the head of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, got the answer to his plea to Iran’s supreme leader for her freedom. It was from the Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York, not the Iranian Embassy. (Iran and the United States have not had diplomatic relations since April 1980).

Enjoy!

Today’s Times carries a correction almost a year after the last major correction they had to make about Venezuela and its president, Hugo Chavez. I have my problems with Chavez, but the Times (and most US corporations and politicians) just hate the guy. So much so, that facts can get in the way of assumptions.

Example 1, the discounted heating oil Chavez gives to poor US residents. Even in the midst of a better-than-usual article, they slipped in a 3-orders-of-magnitude mistake:

An article on Sunday about environmental and economic development projects in the South Bronx financed by Citgo Petroleum, the American subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, gave an incorrect amount in some editions for discounted heating oil delivered to Americans last winter, and the amount it expects to deliver this winter. It delivered 100 million gallons, not 100,000, last winter, and plans to deliver 110 million gallons, not 110,000, this winter. Picture captions in one edition misidentified a man shown watering a rooftop garden in the South Bronx and standing with other members of a community group that received financing from Citgo Petroleum. He is Stephen Oliveira, not Henry Lajara. (Go to Article)

More amazing was the error from one year ago. Remember when Chavez spoke at the UN and said how much he liked Noam Chomsky and how sad he was that the (very much alive) man was dead? The US media chortled at this idiot’s foolishness. Well… Chavez didn’t say that. In fact, it was the mono-lingual US press that misunderstood. And instead of having another front page story – to correct the error and analyze the speed with which the media propogated it – we got this, more than two weeks later:

Published: October 6, 2006

An article on Sept. 21 about criticism of President Bush at the United Nations by President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran reported that Mr. Chávez praised a book by Noam Chomsky, the linguist and social critic. It reported that later, at a news conference, Mr. Chávez said that he regretted not having met Mr. Chomsky before he died. The article noted that in fact, Mr. Chomsky is alive. The assertion that Mr. Chávez had made this misstatement was repeated in a Times interview with Mr. Chomsky the next day.

In fact, what Mr. Chávez said was, ’’I am an avid reader of Noam Chomsky, as I am of an American professor who died some time ago.’’ Two sentences later Mr. Chávez named John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who died last April, calling both him and Mr. Chomsky great intellectual figures.

Mr. Chávez was speaking in Spanish at the news conference, but the simultaneous English translation by the United Nations left out the reference to Mr. Galbraith and made it sound as if the man who died was Mr. Chomsky.

Readers pointed out the error in e-mails to The Times soon after the first article was published. Reporters reviewed the recordings of the news conference in English and Spanish, but not carefully enough to detect the discrepancy, until after the Venezuelan government complained publicly on Wednesday.

Editors and reporters should have been more thorough earlier in checking the accuracy of the simultaneous translation.

Enjoy!

Another amusing category of Times errors is reports on the media or newspaper industry.

Today, they ran these corrections. They aren’t the funniest ever, but they are somewhat amusing. With an endorsement like that, how can you not read on?

An article in Business Day yesterday reported on a growing trend among large newspapers to accept some circulation declines because of the high expense of attracting and keeping new subscribers. The article was illustrated with a photograph of a delivery truck for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News and a caption that said “Big American newspapers sell about 10 percent fewer copies today than they did in 2000.” The Inquirer’s circulation, like those of other newspapers, has declined from its 2000 levels, but since new owners took over last year, its daily circulation increased almost 7 percent from September 2006 to March 2007, compared with the previous six-month period. The Philadelphia Daily News’ circulation also increased by slightly more than 1 percent in the same period. Neither The Inquirer nor The Daily News was mentioned in the article, and the photograph was an inappropriate illustration for it. (Go to Article.)

and

An article on Thursday about a decision by the federal Bureau of Prisons to return religious materials that had been purged from prison chapel libraries omitted the news organization to which the bureau initially announced its decision, and which was the first to report it. It was National Public Radio. (Go to Article.)

In one case, they make a competitor look bad, in the other, they hide credit for the story.

I don’t think these were deliberate errors, but I think it’s amusing when the (uncorrected) error also makes the Times look (at some level) good.

Today the NYT has a correction that should be a story in its own right: how medical care is reported in the Times.

But it’s particularly amazing given a correction last week.

Last week:

In the recent GM/UAW negotiations, the Times coverage has been skewed towards management. Sometimes a little too much. From September 18:

An article in some copies of Business Day on Saturday about negotiations between the United Automobile Workers and General Motors misstated the amount of pay autoworkers will receive if they strike. It is $200 per week, not per day.

But that’s not as good as one of the top ten corrections I’ve ever seen in the Times. Consider this was a front page story.

This is from today:

Editors’ Note
A front-page article on Thursday reported on the implications of the newly negotiated contract between General Motors and the United Automobile Workers union, including the impact of its terms on both the company and its unionized employees. Among the provisions was a voluntary employee benefit association, or VEBA, which will hold in trust the money to provide health care benefits to union members. The article said that under previous contracts, the medical benefits were so generous that union members had little incentive to take better care of their health. This unattributed assertion, unsupported by any evidence that personal health habits are influenced by the level of health care coverage, should not have been made. (Go to the article.)

What kind of health care do they get at the Times?

Previously, I blogged about the obituary for Joe O’Donnell.

He was a photographer. It turns out that he lied about a number of the famous images he took.

These lies only fully came to light after his death. His obituary contained many mis-credits and the Times had to issue a correction.

Today, they have a front-page story (below the fold) on the saga.

They also have another correction:

An obituary on Aug. 14 about the photographer Joe O’Donnell, who learned the craft with the Marine Corps during World War II, described well-known pictures of four presidents that he claimed to have taken. A correction in this space on Sept. 5 described two erroneous credits to him on photographs which ran with the obituary — one, also mentioned in the obituary, of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s funeral caisson in 1963, which was actually taken by Stan Stearns for United Press International; and one of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill meeting in Tehran in 1943, by an unknown photographer. In addition, the obituary also erroneously attributed a photograph of Vice President Richard M. Nixon during his “kitchen debate” in Moscow with Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1959; it was taken by Elliott Erwitt, not by Mr. O’Donnell.

Now, I don’t mean to be cynical, but the Times seems to be more concerned with their mistake here than the far more important “mistake” they made in the coverage of Iraq during the run up to the US invasion (and since). From their coverage of the anti-war movement to their credulous regurgitation of White House talking points on WMDs, the Times has a long history of substantial errors on Iraq and just about everything else substantive.

The past few days have provided a number of correction gems, illustrating various categories of corrections.

1. Obituary corrections. I love these, particularly for obits that should’ve been in the can and fact-checked. Even better is when the error completely undermines the original obituary. Witness:

Two pictures on Aug. 14 with an obituary about the news photographer Joe O’Donnell carried erroneous credits, and the obituary also included one of the incorrect credits. The photograph of a saluting John F. Kennedy Jr. during the funeral for his father in 1963 was taken by Stan Stearns for United Press International, not by Mr. O’Donnell. The photographer who took the second picture, showing Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill during a wartime meeting in Tehran in 1943, is not known, although Mr. O’Donnell claimed credit for it and the Kennedy picture. Mr. O’Donnell is not known to have been in Tehran at the time. A Nashville gallery that handled Mr. O’Donnell’s work supplied the incorrect information. The Times is researching other claims by Mr. O’Donnell reported in the obituary.

At least the first one is arguably amongst the most famous images of the twentieth century:

and

I wonder what corrections are coming for Luciano Pavarotti’s Obituary.

2. The (extremely) ironic. Here, we have a story which misquotes someone and turns a Holocaust researcher into a denier (of sorts):

The Jerusalem Journal article yesterday, about the pornographic pocket books with Nazi themes that were circulated in Israel in the 1960s, misquoted Na’ama Shik, a researcher at Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, regarding the pocket book “Doll’s House,” about a Jewish woman serving in a notorious brothel called Block 24 in Auschwitz. She said the book — not Block 24 — was fictional.

3. The amusing-because-it’s-the-Times. I’d have loved to be a fly on the wall during this newsroom debate. This one is going on our fridge.

An article on July 19 about John Edwards’s tour of poverty-stricken areas of Appalachia included a debatable reference to Robert F. Kennedy, whom Mr. Edwards praised for his work on poverty issues. The statement that Mr. Kennedy had “appeared headed” for the Democratic presidential nomination after winning the California primary in 1968 was speculation, not established fact. A reader raised the point in an e-mail message the day the article appeared; this correction was delayed by debate about the error.

4. Sheer volume of errors in a single article

An article on Monday about a financial gift from Gov. Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey to Rocco Riccio, a former state employee who is the brother-in-law of a former companion of the governor, misstated the amount he gave. It was $10,000, not $15,000. (Nancy Dunlap, Mr. Corzine’s personal business manager, donated $5,000.)

The article also referred incorrectly to the current business relationship between the governor and his former chief of staff, Tom Shea, who Mr. Riccio said had asked him to resign from the Human Services Department after he was accused of looking up the tax returns of political enemies. Mr. Shea is a consultant to Mr. Corzine, a position paid for personally by the governor; he did not stop working for Mr. Corzine when he left the chief of staff’s job last Friday.

The article also referred incorrectly to Mr. Shea’s response to an e-mail message asking him to comment. The message was sent to an incorrect address that an editor gave the reporter; Mr. Shea did not fail to respond.

Because of an editing error, the article referred incorrectly to Mr. Corzine’s connection to a Hoboken building where his former companion recently bought a condominium. Mr. Corzine rents a condominium there, he does not own one.

This one also has the bonus of a hint of newsroom infighting (“incorrect address that an editor gave the reporter”).

Enjoy.

There is one great correction and one good one in today’s New York Times.

First, the good. This is just a funny screwup because it makes the Times look so provinical (“Spain, Italy, what’s the difference? Neither of them have Manhattan.”):

An art review on Thursday about the “NeoIntegrity” show at the Derek Eller Gallery, in Chelsea, misstated the surname of the artist whose “American Flag” is in the show. He is Andrew Madrid, not Milan.

And now the great. This jewel is a fine example of the sardonic correction (and, given the NYT’s Islamophobia, it’s also borderline political):

An article in Science Times on July 17 about the widespread distribution of “Atlas of Creation,” a book with an Islamic creationist point of view, not only incorrectly identified a company involved in shipping some of the books but misstated its role and its responsiveness to questions. The company, SBS Worldwide Ltd. (not SDS Worldwide, as the article had it, and corrected in this space on July 21), says it cleared a shipment of the books through customs but had nothing to do with their further distribution in the United States. SBS Worldwide Ltd. did not return calls and e-mail messages asking about its role before the article was published because it never got any; The Times had sent the questions to the wrong company. This correction was delayed in the confusion.

Enjoy.