Regret the Error

Are corrections a good indicator of a larger problem?
That was one of the questions we posed to Seth Mnookin in a recent interview. Now two journalists are using corrections to question the competence of New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley. First, Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune penned a Sunday column that listed some of Stanley’s "more colorful gaffes." (The extra scrutiny of Stanley’s work is a result  of this dispute between her and Geraldo Rivera. Even the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz has weighed in on Rivera’s side.) From Rosenthal’s column:

…We all make mistakes–especially me–but Stanley’s pieces have had doozies.
The Times has issued corrections to point out that the WB is not a cable network and Fox’s short-lived hotel soap "North Shore" was not a program about the sex industry. Another piece, according to the correction, "misstated the political backdrop of the economic recession that preceded the good times that were the setting of `Friends.’"
A personal favorite, though, is the 2004 column that mentioned Adm. James Stockdale. As the correction said, "The admiral ran as an independent in 1992 with Ross Perot, not as a Republican in 1996 with John McCain, who was not a nominee." Um, yeah.

Then John Cook of Reference Tone went back and collected all of Stanley’s corrections since 2001. They’re listed here. Here’s what Cook, a former television writer for the Chicago Tribune, writes:

I immediately assumed that Rosenthal merely had it in for Stanley, a star of sorts on the TV beat who inspired envy among some critics (until a couple months ago, Rosenthal was the Sun-Times’ TV critic). So I Nexised "(byline)Alessandra Stanley and correction appended" and–my god. The woman is clocking corrections at more than a monthly rate. And they are stupid, stupid errors. Still, somehow I don’t get the sense that anybody’s writing any "we have to stop Alessandra Stanley from writing for the Times–now" memos.
…In the interest of brevity, I only went back to 2001, when Stanley started writing incorrect things about television, and I made them really tiny. In Stanley’s defense, her overall correction rate for that period is a not-quite-appalling-but-still-kinda-large 11 percent–she’s got an 89 percent chance of being right! Her rate for the past year is a disconcerting 14 percent, or a one-in-seven chance of being wrong.)

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