Back at the height of the Jayson Blair scandal, Slate’s Jack Shafer wrote an interesting article about newspaper corrections, and focused in on how the New York Times handles them. The article tracks The Times’ fixation with corrections back to the tenure of A.M. Rosenthal:
“[Rosenthal] launched an aggressive campaign in 1972 to detect, right, and highlight Times errors. The Times corrections culture nurtured by Rosenthal seems to revel in correcting every misspelling, transposed digit, historical inaccuracy, and boner. The Times so loves its fallibility that it authorized a collection of its wildest and most shameful errors in the book, Kill Duck Before Serving.”
Shafer also raises an interesting point: a paper such as The Times has many more readers and faces much more scrutiny than other papers in the country, which could partially explain why its corrections page is so consistently well-populated. Readers of this site will see that larger publications such as The New York Times and Los Angeles Times tend to show up here more often. While it may give the impression that they are more error-prone, one should also take into account that they have many more eyes scanning the paper for errors, many more stories in their paper, and also pursue fairly transparent corrections policies. That said, they still make the mistakes. But it is possible that errors in smaller papers are more likely to go unnoticed — or unacknowledged.
In his article, Shafer also selected a few of his favorites from the book of Times corrections. Click below to read them and others.
April 25, 1981
An article about decorative cooking incorrectly described a presentation of Muscovy duck by Michel Fitoussi, a New York chef. In preparing it, Mr. Fitoussi uses a duck that has been killed.
May 30, 1993
Because of a transmission error, an interview in the Egos & Ids column on May 16 with Mary Matalin, the former deputy manager of the Bush campaign who is a co-host of a new talk show on CNBC, quoted her incorrectly on the talk show host Rush Limbaugh. She said he was “sui generis,” not “sweet, generous.”
April 7, 1995
Because of a transcription error, an article about Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato’s remarks about Judge Lance A. Ito misquoted the Senator at one point. In his conversation with the radio host Don Imus, he said: “I mean, this is a disgrace. Judge Ito will be well-known.” He did not say, “Judge Ito with the wet nose.”
Jan. 10, 2001
An article about a new sports drink made from a synthetic form of the juice that helps giant Japanese hornets fly faster and farther misstated the amount of weight the hornets can lift. It is three grams, not kilograms.
You can read more from the book here. Delicious stuff.
