How can cutbacks not be mentioned in NYT analysis of Cronkite debacle?

You can tell she relished every second of that smackdown.....as she should have.

 

Here's a link to the Public Editor in Sunday's paper. I must admit, in parts, they're quite frank about things.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/opinion/02pubed.html?_r=1

 

And the terrible thing is, they nearly had his age wrong. How do you mess up such a basic fact as that?

The only thing worse would have been if they mispelled Cronkite's name.

 

In fairness, not his age when he died. His age when he retired.

 

"Alessandra Stanley, a prolific writer much admired by editors for the intellectual heft of her coverage of television..."

Laughter, always the best medicine.

 

Before 2004, she was stationed abroad, in the Moscow and Rome bureaus. I imagine it's harder to fact-check those stories. Makes you wonder how much she was screwing up, undetected, before 2004.

 

Are people just now figuring out that Alessandra Stanley is a terrible television critic? People who follow television have know this for years. There are people who post comments on Sepinwall's blog who I trust more than her, both in accuracy and insight.

 

I like the "by editors" part of the much-admired part. Subtle.

 

If this is true, it's 99 corrections in 4.5 years.

A third of that would be terrible. I don't care how much copy you produce or how "in-depth" they are. Ninety-nine times? And she is still employed, while good journalists across America are being sent out the doors.

 

I'd bet few people on this board have had 26 corrections in their entire CAREER, let alone 99 in six years. I wasn't perfect by any means, but I can say with absolutely certainty I didn't have 26 corrections in 17 years.

Let me type that again... 99 corrections in six years. From a New York Freakin' Times reporter. Like you, BT, I don't get it. It doesn't fit in the mental Samsonite.

Ibid. WT.

When I taught J-100, we'd spend half a class talking about obits. I stressed to the hordes that if there was ever a time not to fuck up a story, to misspell a name or mess with those pesky facts, well, this would be that time.

When I worked in New Mexico, I heard that a reporter was fired at another paper for misspelling a name in an obit. If someone at a 10k-circ in Devil's Asshole, NM can get fired for that, yet Alessandra Stanley skates merrily along averaging 16-plus corrections a year working for the Paper of Record, well . . . the Four Horsemen are just about in sight.

 

The only reasonable mitigating issue is that the NYT is very good --- perhaps even obsessive --- about correcting everything. In just about every edition you will see a dozen or more corrections. Our paper averages about 2-3 corrections per week. And it's not because we aren't making mistakes.

That doesn't excuse the pathetic excuse for a journalist Ms. Stanley is. It's just that had she made those same mistakes at most other papers, they wouldn't have even bothered to run as many corrections as the NYT.

Remember, according to the NYT, these latest mistakes only rose Ms. Stanley's error ranking to No. 4.

Who the hell are Nos. 1-3?

And what does it say when the "best" . . . can be so bad?

 

That's very true, BT.

I get the NY Times at home and on A2 every day, there's a handful of corrections. I used to bring a paper in every semester to show my classes, pointing out that if the Paper of Record has mistakes that get through a writer and three-plus editors, that perhaps you need to make sure you're on top of what you're doing for my class.

Yes, they're obsessive about it. And Craig Whitney seems sincere about cracking heads. But I thing "head-cracking" in this case is going to involve a deskie or two. Meanwhile, the cause of the problem be-bops merrily along, averaging her 16-plus corrections a year.

Shameful.