Tuesday, July 27, 2004

Those New York Times corrections, with annotations

One shouldn't mock the NYT too much, because in their highly visible corrections and editorial followups to past reporting missteps, they do much more than just about any other media outlet.  But their daily corrections section nearly always leaves out the juicy bits, like their occasional tendency to say that such-and-such article was indeed total shite, without saying which particular journalist wrote it.    But in one of our many services to readers, we feel compelled to offer our own annotations to Tuesday's corrections.  Since the NYT, in most un-bloglike fashion, doesn't seem to offer a permanent link to each day's corrections, we'll reproduce the relevant ones below.

First:
A front-page article on Saturday about President Bush's appearance before the National Urban League in Detroit misstated the name he used for the rival party. Mr. Bush said, "Does the Democrat party take African-American voters for granted?" — not "Democratic."

This is revealing.  It's standard Republican spin to always refer to the other party as the Democrat party.   The blog Political Winds was presciently tracking this tendency just two weeks ago.   It traces to the charming Joe McCarthy, who hated the proper party name's association with democracy.  But what we learn from this correction is that someone, almost certainly in White House media operations, is specifically calling outlets to enforce this particular spin word.

Second:
An article on Wednesday about the plight of single men facing a shortage of single women in Alaska misstated the surname of a ticket agent who said he was looking for a long-term relationship. He is Seth Augdahl, not Augdah
 
So, that's why the phone calls from eager women weren't flooding in.

And finally:
Because of an editing error, an article in Business Day yesterday about plans by Banco Santander Central Hispano to buy Abbey National of Britain misstated the stock price of Abbey National on Friday. It was 580 pence ($10.62), not £580 ($1,061.86).
 
So if you're an Abbey National shareholder and you calculated your wealth based on the original article, divide your previous answer by 100.  D'OH!


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