Presswatch: Corrections From the Edge
Corry, John
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...If it shows it is scrupulous about small facts, we are more likely to accept what it says about large issues...
...In carefully measured on-the-one-hand-thison-the-other-hand-that paragraphs, the New York Times apologized for violating its own terribly high standards...
...It seems that "dozens" of United Way organizations had not stopped raising funds for the Scouts...
...The Times may be cracking up...
...That's tough stuff, although the Times will ignore it...
...Beneath this was a correction about a picture that had accompanied an article on the use of recorded bird sounds in televised golf tournaments...
...by Johr~ Corry Corrections From the Edge Lee was confined...
...lawsuits and harassment from government officials will force operators offthe Web...
...Two days later, the Times was at it again...
...the Catholic Church does not have a policy against ordaining gay men, and so on...
...Charges of "hysterical" reporting and racism hung in the air, and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr...
...But my favorite," he wrote, "is the headline of Sept...
...surely individuals, corporations, and even entire cities were punishing them for their homophobia...
...In other words, had he A venerable newspaper cracks up...
...been mistreated because he was a Chinese...
...it turned it upside down...
...You could hardly hang the racist charge on them...
...But then the Justice Department dropped 58 of the 59 charges against him, and a judge released him from prison...
...the correction should have used the word "were," and not "included...
...An unctuous Bill Clinton said he "always had reservations" about the case, and White House flack Joe Lockhart carried on about "near hysterical investigative reporting...
...It buried the lovely story about Gore, his dog, and his mother-in-law on page 18...
...When the Supreme Court said the Scouts could exclude homosexuals, the Times was appalled...
...If the news editors would denounce themselves, then the editorial writers would too...
...The bitter truth was that hard facts could impede even the New York Times...
...The transition from the Web we know today to one much friendlier to the disabled can be either a smooth or a painful ride...
...Lee, which might have humanized him...
...Technology will be the guiding force, but Congress and the courts still have the power to complicate matters...
...She knew what the Times wanted, and had done her best to comply, and now everything had fallen apart...
...The American Spectator _9 November 2000 65...
...When Republicans pointed this out, however, the Times did not want to know about it...
...Chicago and San Francisco had not stopped them from using parks and schools...
...For the time being, it's hard to tell which road we'll be driving...
...But the Times is pursuing a dangerous policy here, and corrections can reveal more than intended...
...nuclear secrets, the Times had driven much of the coverage of the case against Lee...
...Flexibility from both will keep traffic moving...
...Lee had been properly singled out as the prime suspect...
...had called for a full mea culpa...
...T he corrections, of course, are run as proof of the Times's high standards and commitment to accuracy...
...As it gets better, speech recognition software, already in use to help the disabled navigate their PCs and the Web without key or mouse commands, is bound to make almost all tasks on the Web easier for the blind and those with motor impairment...
...Yes, the actress Demi Moore underwent breast augmentation surgery, the correction said, "but has not had the implants removed...
...The story appeared on page one, and an editorial then followed...
...it should have paid more attention to the "political context of the Chinese weapons debate, in which Republicans were eager to score points against the White House...
...Presumably there will now be a correction of the correction, if there has not been one already...
...American...
...Ever since it first reported that federal investigators believed China was developing its weapons program with the aid of stolen U.S...
...So among other things, the Times said, it should have "prepared a full-scale profile of Dr...
...Nonetheless we still don't know why Lee downloaded all that information, or what he did with the tapes, and as the news editors themselves promised in the last sentence of their apology, "Our coverage of this case is not over...
...Actually the Times could live JOHN CORP, Y is The American Spectator's senior corres#ondent...
...Truth must be served, and let the chips fall where they may, on Demi Moore's boobs or Wen Ho Lee...
...The Times did not run frequent corrections in the past, two or three a week, say, and usually for misspellings or serious typos...
...Therefore the apology was at least premature, and, considering the solemnity with which both it and the editorial were presented, it was also a little nutty...
...An example: The Times put the dubious, and two-week-old, RATS con> mereial story on page one...
...with all that...
...The day before the Wen Ho Lee editorial, there were six...
...It was the charge it had abetted racism that hurt...
...It cited the story, and said the widespead campaign to protest the Scouts' discriminatory policy was "heartening...
...Krauthammer may be a Pulitzer Prize winner, buthe is also a conservative, and his politics are suspect, so why bother...
...But corrections now appear all the time, and, while they are not meant to be, they are often the most entertaining and revealing items in the paper...
...The ones on the Boy Scouts were choice...
...They know Lee is guilty of something, even if they're not sure what...
...As house organ of the new church it had to show its displeasure, and stiffeditorials were not enough...
...Morrow was making fun of file Times, and that was no laughing matter...
...Krauthammer quoted the Gore-Bush front-page headlines from the two first weeks in September...
...This is how it began: "The Republicans continued a sharp assault yesterday on Vice President A1Gore...
...But then came the corrections...
...We find," they said in a 1,6oo-word editorial, "that we too quickly accepted the government's theory that espionage was the main reason for Chinese nuclear advances and its view that Dr...
...Virtually all of them reflected favorably on Gore, and unfavorably on Bush...
...Consequently a young reporter was assigned to a story with a foregone conclusion: Support for the Boy Scouts had to be declining...
...But where "we felt short of our standards," the Times intoned, "the blame lies principally with those who directed the coverage," and not with any of its reporters, "who remained persistent and fair-minded in their newsgathering in the face of some fierce attacks...
...As it grows more obsessively liberal, it also grows more obsessed with demonstrating its journalistic perfection...
...Gore does indeed have a dog and a mother-in-law, but all the 64 November 2000 ' The American Spectator rest he made up...
...But as they primly pointed out I t was the publisher's idea...
...7: 'Gore Offers Vision of Better Times for Middle Class.' It's the kind of headline Pravda used to run for Brezhnev's presidential campaigns...
...It not only buried the story...
...The Times takes itself very seriously, and insists we do, too...
...Meanwhile its liberal bias has become so consistent and apparent that, as Charles Krauthammer wrote in the Washington Post, "It would take a mollusk to miss the pattern...
...it should have taken % closer look at Notra Trulock," the intelligence official who "sounded some of the loudest alarms about Chinese espionage...
...Signs of strain are showing...
...On the other hand, while the Times was agonizing over Wen Ho Lee, Lance Morrow wrote in Time magazine that the Times is the "curia and house organ of America's new established church--the church of correctness and diversity, with all its rigid doctrines now embedded in the rules of corporations, of government, of universities...
...Gore had said his mother-in-law had to pay $1o8 for an arthritis drug that he could buy for his dog for only $37.80...
...It showed a house sparrow...
...It is Manischewitz," the Times said, "not Manishewitz," A few days before that, the News of the Week in Review section corrected an article from the previous Sunday about a trend toward enlarging women's breasts...
...But telecasts that included white-throated sparrows would not necessarily exclude house sparrows...
...You felt sorry for the young reporter...
...the birds heard on the telecasts included whitethroated sparrows and hermit thrushes," the correction said...
...They also said they "should have looked more searchingly at the conditions" under which in their own defense, they had "warned about the dangers of racial pofiling" even before Lee had been indicted...
...From the Editors--The Times and Wen Ho Lee," it said, and its 1,6o0 words took up almost the whole top half of page two, where it ran next to the Cartier and Tourneau ads, just above Bergdorf Goodman and Salvatore Ferragalno...
...One confessed that a story about the gift packages Joe Lieberman's mother sent to reporters had dropped the "c" in the brand name of the bagel chips...
Vol. 33 • November 2000 • No. 9
