October 2, 2005
IS HIS NAME EVEN PAUL?:
'NY Times' Finally Runs Full Correction on Krugman Column, Announces New Policy (Editor & Publisher, October 01, 2005)
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 errors on that page.As the paper noted, 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 pointing out 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."
Collins also announced that the paper would henceforth be running regular corrections and "for the record" explanations under the editorials.
Given his track record, why not just run the corrections to Paul Krugman instead of his column? Posted by Orrin Judd at October 2, 2005 11:49 AM
But you can't have corrections without the column... but then you can't have the column without the corrections...
"That's some catch, that Catch-22."
Posted by: Just John at October 2, 2005 1:28 PMThe incredible thing is that Krugman has gone from the short list for the Nobel prize in Economics to a public embarasement in a few short years. The first verified victim of BDS.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at October 2, 2005 3:52 PMOne would think the Times would be ready to throw in the towel and yield (due to embarrassment alone) when reasonable conservative voices point out error after error, and bias after bias. After all, they strive to be the paper of record for the entire nation, no? It must be very difficult to have your lunch eaten almost every day by the pajama brigade.
But perhaps the Times is following Kos (and the DU, and all the rest), and just trying to be more aggressive. Yeah, that's it. Speaking rant to power!
Posted by: jim hamlen at October 2, 2005 3:52 PMRobert Schwartz:
I'll bet they still give it to him.
Posted by: Matt Murphy at October 2, 2005 4:26 PMJim: The NYTimes is not more responsible than Kos or DU, just more respectable. Further, their audience is obviously just as demented as that of DU or Kos. Before the recent fee payment system, the most popular e-mail articles were always Krugman, MoDo, and Ritchy Rich.
Matt: Not to worry. He crossed the line in professional decorum, he will be an outcast. Diet Doctors don't win the Nobel Prize for medicine.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at October 2, 2005 5:03 PMMake it a feature like the crosswords. It should be possible to reconstruct a Krugman column from a complete set of corrections. Then you publish the column the day after the corrections, so readers can check their answers.
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Yes, very.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at October 2, 2005 9:06 PMRobert:
I used to read the Times every Tuesday (the Science issue). But that was a long time ago, before Dowdy and Krugman and repugnant Frank Rich. Now, when I am in the Northeast or flying through Newark, I pick up the Post.
I know if I wanted to be thought of as the standard, I would try diligently to be the best. Is there ANYONE at the Times (other than their two reporters in Iraq, John Burns and Dexter Filkins) who feels the same way?
Posted by: jim hamlen at October 2, 2005 9:54 PMDon't get me started on Burns. He was the one whose sloppy reporting created the looted museum kerfufel.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at October 2, 2005 11:53 PM