Regret the Error

New York Times public editor Byron Calame has been agitating for the paper’s op-ed section to correct some lingering errors. One is from an editorial on April 26, and another is from an editorial on December 30. The Times yesterday finally published the corrections:

Our public editor reminded us last week that we have not corrected two errors we made in the past year. In an editorial on April 26, we should have written that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve had a capacity of 727 million barrels, not gallons (Go to Article).
In an editorial on Dec. 30, we said that the top basic tax rate was 31 percent before the 1990 increase. It was 28 percent. The deal raised it to 31 percent. (Go to Article)

Unfortunately, these corrections do not fit with the paper’s standard correction formula. Any time a correction is delayed, the paper notes the reason for the delay. See an example here (“…The error was pointed out in an e-mail in February; the correction was delayed for research after a lapse at
The Times.”) The first sentence of the corrections talks about Calame reminding the editors to correct these items — but there is no explanation for the wholly unacceptable delay.
Calame’s blog post makes it clear that at least one op-ed editor has known about the errors for some time. He writes, “Each of the two errors in editorials has been brought to the attention of the deputy editorial page editor in at least three e-mails from me over the past four months.”
Yet the editors chose not to act until after Calame called them out in public in his September 29 post. Readers deserve an explanation for the delay, and the Times own correction standard demands one.
It’s unacceptable that Calame had to publicly shame the paper’s op-ed section into running corrections. But good on him for doing so.
Calame also notes another error he thinks should be corrected:

“The third inaccuracy, in a March 28 Op-Ed article by an outside contributor, remains uncorrected because editors there don’t think it is an error. Nor does Peter Bergen, the author of the Op-Ed article and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
The second paragraph of the article stated that “the 9/11 commission found no ‘collaborative relationship’ between the ultrafundamentalist Osama bin Laden and the secular Saddam Hussein.” But my electronic search of the final report of the 9/11 Commission turned up no “collaborative relationship” phrase. The final report uses the phrase, “collaborative operational relationship.”

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