In This Case, Delegation is Definitely a Good Thing
I have done my share of ripping The New York Times, all richly deserved.
But, I don’t have the time, patience, or stomach for dragging corrections out of a publication whose columnists and writers won’t admit they’re wrong until their faces are rubbed in the truth for days; won’t document their corrections until shamed by their ombudsman, public editor, or whoever; and, when the corrections are finally found and noted in the general corrections, continue to run the original pieces containing the errors without accompanying corrections, thereby guaranteeing that future readers will continue to be misled by the original errors.
That is why I hereby continue to delegate that task of identifying, demanding, and following up on Times corrections to these intrepid bloggers (and others too numerous to mention), who have done and continue to do a marvelous job of riding herd on The Times (links are to each blogger’s latest Times-related entry; HT Instapundit):
- Don Luskin
- Michelle Malkin
- EU Rota
- Tim Worstall
- Mediacrity
- Decision ‘08
When you read what they’ve had to go through to drag the truth out of The Times, you’ll see why, in this case, delegation is a good thing.
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UPDATE: You can see here (HT Drudge) why trying to obtain and monitor corrections in The Times is so maddening:
NY Times Finally Runs Full Correction on Krugman Column, Announces New Policy
NEW YORK Just days after it ran an editors’ note–under pressure from outside and within–that sort of admitted it had erred in a blast at Fox News’ Gerald Rivera during the Katrina tragedy, The New York Times finally ran a full correction on Sunday, on its editorial page, for a miscue by columnist Paul Krugman, while announcing a new policy on noting errors on that page.
Krugman had three times previously admitted getting wrong part of his Aug. 19 column about media recounts of the 2000 Bush-Gore race, but critics kept claiming that he still hadn’t gotten it quite right. Editorial Page Editor Gail Collins wrote on Sunday that it had turned into a “correction run amok.”
After publishing his third correction on the Web, Krugman asked Collins, she wrote, “if he could refrain from revisiting the subject yet again in print. I agreed, feeling we had reached the point of cruelty to readers. But I was wrong. The correction should have run in the same newspaper where the original error and all its little offspring had appeared.”
