Friday, January 23, 2009
Layers of editors, etc.: Is this really an error?
The New York Times has corrected an almost laughable error:
An article on Thursday about new ethics rules imposed by President Obama on members of his administration paraphrased incorrectly from a statement by the Republican National Committee about a provision barring former lobbyists from working for agencies they had lobbied within the past few years. The committee criticized the Obama administration for violating the new standard in some of its appointments; it did not criticize the new rule.
Huh? How do you make that mistake by, er, mistake? Sadly, the average person cannot easily trace the error and the correction, because the Times revised the original story online. One needs the print edition to know whether the error was plausible, or not. Fortune smiles upon us, for we found the original in the TigerHawk recycling bin!:
The Republican National Committee criticized that requirement and said the new administration was already violating it.
The revised version online says:
The Republican National Committee criticized the Obama administration for violating this new standard in some of its appointments.
This strikes me as a difficult mistake to make. How do you write the first version of the sentence, or read it as an editor, without thinking "either the Republicans are completely insane or we have gotten this all wrong"? It is almost as though the reporters and editors of the Times expect Republicans to be say crazy things...
4 Comments:
By 
Viking Kaj, at
Sat Jan 24, 04:09:00 AM:
The link to the original error correction has been updated, so that it no longer connects to the item TH referenced.
And the changes to the subsequent article, as TH notes, make it hard to trace the original error.
All of which goes to show you that the hard "news" is no longer the news.
It seems the whole world is a blog and we are no longer the players but rather merely being played.
No wonder newspapers are failing left and right.
By TigerHawk, at
Sat Jan 24, 07:50:00 AM:
Actually, even only occasionally serious bloggers are generally transparent about mistakes other people catch.
By 
, at
Sat Jan 24, 11:34:00 AM:
Allegory: Little Red Riding Public, To Big Bad NYT, " my, what fast correcting moves you have Mr. Wolf....."
B.B.Wolf to L.R.P. " Yeah, the better to revise HISTORY with, you dupes".
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Sat Jan 24, 09:23:00 PM:
Granted that there are some honest liberals who would read this and object to this, I submit that there are many of the Times readers who simply blew past it. It was a criticism of Obama by Republicans, they could not care less about the substance. They assume there must be some Obama explanation that makes this alright.
