The New York Times ombudsman has delved into the story of how Alessandra Stanley’s article about Walter Cronkite contained so many errors (previously blogged here):
The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.
But a more nuanced answer is that even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.
Oh, and yet another error in the original piece was corrected yesterday.
Wow. This is the kind of thing that keeps editors awake at night.
That public editor’s column was incredible – he really hung the reporter out to dry. Apparently for awhile, she had her own personal copy editor who would fact-check all of her stories because she made so many errors. My question is, why wasn’t she fired?