An article on May 25, 2007, ‘The Cult Guru Who Stole My Son’ made claims that William Van Gordon was a ‘brainwashed zombie’ and Edo Shonin brainwashed him and that the Buddhist retreat which they ran was a cult. We accept this is untrue. We apologise to both men for the contrary impression given. Link
Thanks, @Lucie_M!
Hamas-Israel negotiations: An Op-Ed article titled "Can Hamas Cut a Deal for Peace?," which was published on June 17, 2003, paraphrased and partially quoted former Israeli army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon as having "talked of rubbing in the fact that the Palestinians are ‘a defeated people.’ " The Times was recently made aware of questions regarding the source and accuracy of this material. The Times has been unable to verify that Yaalon expressed the thought or used the quoted words. The quote and the paraphrase should not have been used.
Background here.
Earlier today, Mathew Ingram, communities editor of the Globe And Mail, sent out this tweet:
He was referring to this notable Times correction from July 17, 1969:
My CJR online column for this week uses a very delayed correction from the New York Times to examine the paper’s policy for correcting its archives. An excerpt is below. Click the headline for the full text.
Everything Old Is New Again
During The New York Times’s 4 p.m. news meeting on Tuesday, a gathering that draws top editors from the paper, the culture editor described a story for the next day’s paper that included a connection to a Times article from over a century ago
The current article reported about a secret inscription rumored to have been added to a watch belonging to Abraham Lincoln. On Tuesday, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History revealed that it had opened the watch and confirmed the presence of the hidden message.
“Basically, as an aside, the culture editor said: ‘Interestingly, the Times wrote an article on the jeweler [who made the engraving] in 1906 in which he discussed the inscription. But it turns out he had it wrong’,” says Greg Brock, a Times senior editor and the person in charge of the paper’s corrections.
The assembled editors shared a chuckle about the mistake from roughly a century ago. Brock, however, immediately locked eyes with Craig Whitney, the paper’s standards editor and his boss. “We both kind of raised our eyebrows as if to say. ‘Hmm, maybe we should…’,” he says.
They did. On Wednesday, the paper published a correction to the erroneous article from 1906 …
An article on April 30, 1906, about a New York watch repairer, Jonathan Dillon, who recalled secretly inscribing Abraham Lincoln’s watch while working on it in a Washington jewelry store in 1861, misstated part of the inscription, using information from Mr. Dillon (who the article noted had, at 84, “a remarkable memory.”) The inscription reads:
“Jonathan Dillon April 13- 1861 Fort Sumpter was attacked by the rebels on the above date J Dillon. April 13- 1861 Washington thank God we have a government Jonth Dillon.”
The inscription does not say, as Mr. Dillon recalled in 1906: “The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try.” (Besides misspelling Sumter, Mr. Dillon also inscribed the wrong date. The opening shot of the Civil War was on April 12.)
An article about the watch, which the Smithsonian opened on Tuesday to settle decades-long speculation about the inscription, is on Page C1. Link
Here are a few more Times corrections to archival stories: 1,2, 3. The paper publishes more corrections to old stories than any other news organization, partly due to its online archives.
A listing of credits on April 28, 1960, with a theater review of “West Side Story” on its return to the Winter Garden theater, misstated the surname of the actor who played Action. He is George Liker, not Johnson. (Mr. Liker, who hopes to audition for a role in a Broadway revival of the show planned for February, brought the error to The Times’s attention last month.) Link
An article on Sunday about Senator John McCain’s campaign management style described his role as a Navy pilot in Vietnam incorrectly. He flew bombing missions as an attack aircraft pilot, but he was not a “fighter pilot.” (The error has appeared in numerous other Times articles the past dozen years, most recently on April 9 and on Dec. 15, 2007.) Link
Gawker has some background on this.
Because of an editing error, an article on May 2, 2005, about the suggestion by Jeff Van Gundy, the coach of the Houston Rockets at the time, that fouls were being called more readily and unfairly on his team’s center, Yao Ming, during the N.B.A. playoffs referred incorrectly to the genesis of Van Gundy’s concern. He said it was “an official” — not a referee — who had called him to say that Yao was being singled out in games against the Dallas Mavericks. Van Gundy was fined $100,000 by the league for his comments. Link
The error was repeated in a follow-up article in 2005 and again on Wednesday in an article about Tim Donaghy, a former referee who has pleaded guilty after being charged last year with conspiring with gamblers. In a court filing to seek leniency at sentencing, Donaghy and his lawyer cited the Van Gundy controversy among accusations of misconduct and manipulation of game results by N.B.A. executives and referees. Discussing the Donaghy case on a broadcast on Wednesday night, Van Gundy, now a television analyst, said he had been called by an N.B.A. official in 2005. Link
An obituary on July 11, 1995, about Nevitt Sanford, a psychologist who developed scientific methods to study prejudice and hatred, misidentified the institution where he studied as an undergraduate. It was the University of Richmond, not the University of Virginia. The error was pointed out in an e-mail message this week from a college instructor who used the article for a class. Link
An article on Dec. 7, 2005, about the wine shop Sherry-Lehmann and its training of part-time workers for the Christmas season, referred incorrectly to the family of the owner, Michael Aaron, who commented on handing off the company to the next generation. Mr. Aaron has a son, Alexander; he is not childless. The error was pointed out to the reporter a few months after the article ran, but because of a misunderstanding, no correction was published. Lawyers for Alexander Aaron requested a correction in April, but their letter went astray at The Times. Editors received another request last week. Link
An article on July 5, 1994, about James B. Blair, then the general
counsel for the Tyson Foods company and a longtime confidant and
personal emissary for Bill and Hillary Clinton, misstated benefits that
Tyson received from the state of Arkansas while Mr. Clinton was
governor. Although the company did benefit from at least $7 million in
state tax credits, it did not receive $9 million in loans from the
state. (The error appeared in three other articles and in an editorial
in 1994, all of which were corrected on April 20 of that year. The
correction should have been appended then in The Times’s archives to
those articles: one on the front page on March 18 about Mrs. Clinton’s
commodity trades in the late 1970s; a March 19 article about President
Clinton’s defense of Mrs. Clinton’s investments; a March 30 article
about the White House’s disclosure of the amount Mrs. Clinton invested
in commodities trades, and a March 31 editorial.)
The error in
the July 5 article was discovered during research after the watchdog
group Media Matters twice pointed out that the 1994 correction had not
been appended to the other articles. Link
