Posted on 05/10/2003 10:29:40 AM PDT by sarcasm
I don't think so. Anthony Lewis' comment that "mass explusions are the only way to start on their (the Khymer Rouge's) vision of a new society" was lower. Sydney Schanberg calling predictions of mass executions under Pol Pot "tendentious" was lower. Herbert Matthew's shilling for Castro was lower. Walter Duranty hiding the murder of over 6 million people was lower.
Two Times reporters killed themselves last year. One jumped out of a 7th floor window at the paper's Manhattan headquarters. Wonder what is going on we don't know.
[excerpt, an unofficial transcript of the audio file]
Mr. Raines: I do want to make a point to your readers who are not a part of the journalism community, that the processes of editing on a paper like the Times and other large papers in this country is a multi-layered process; and it’s designed to find the unintentional or accidental errors in the copy of people who are working on an atmosphere of mutual trust and integrity, and holding a share stake on the strict set of journalistic values that we observe here.
This system is not set up to catch someone who sets out to lie, and to use every means at his or her disposal to put false information into the paper.
Mr. Smith I understand the distinction. What I’m curious about is, since he had a great number of corrections published in the paper over his tenure; and since publicly, the prosecutor Bob Horan and others raised questions about his reporting, wasn’t there a red flag to you earlier than last week?
Mr. Raines: The corrections were a red flag. I don’t want to get into a debate with Mr. Horan whose account there has some parts out of it that might be responded to. But communicating with our readers about our efforts to set the record straight.We manage corrections closely; as Jack Schaefer (sp?) and other media commentators have pointed out, on a serious newspaper you will have a higher number of corrections because those papers are aggressive about finding out mistakes, tracking them down.
In the case of this young man, he was working under the direct supervision as an intern, under two of our most rigorous training editors. He had over the space of three years, a correction rate of 5%. From my point of view, the acceptable correction rate is zero, but 5% on a paper like this is not an automatic sign of incompetence. Indeed we have a number of reporters who run in that range, over time, who are without a doubt seasoned professionals.
Because we are aggressive about correcting our errors does not mean we are reckless about letting them into the paper.
I’ve been back over this young man’s personnel record for the entire time he was here. After coming onto the staff in 2001, he went into a period where his error rate shot up to 16% in an eight-month period, . . .
Mr. Smith You might explain how that rate works. That’s 16 errors about of 100 stories?
Mr. Raines I should have said corrections, Terry. 16 corrections. In other words, for every 100 stories, 16 of them had to have something corrected and run in the paper. Sometimes this might be an error or correction that is not due to reporter’s fault, that is, the police released the incorrect spelling of a name, we come back and correct it; it shows up in that reporter’s computer tally.
"Sources say..." Yeah, the sources floating around in the NY Times reporters' imaginations. Believe me, Blair isn't the only reporter there making up sources. It is a common NY Times practice.
Much has been made of the fact that, since hiring Blair in 1998, the Times has run 50 corrections on his stories. Raines, in fact, has said that the young reporter was admonished in a performance report that he had committed an excessive number of mistakes. A number of publications, including this one, have conducted computer searches to see how Blair's error rate compared to that of his colleagues. The Weekly Standard, for example, compares Blair's record to that of senior Times correspondents R.W. Apple and Adam Clymer over the same period of time. Blair had an error rate of 6.9%, less than half Apple's rate of 14% (46 corrections on 327 stories) and almost a third lower than Clymer's rate of 9% (36 corrections on 400 stories). (Since January 2002, this columnist has had an error rate of about 10%, 12 mistakes in 116 stories and columns.)
In the history of Journalism, has there ever been a WORSE editor than Howell Raines? His entire tenure has been fouled by the stench of bias and just general all-around CRAPPY journalism. Pinch won't fire Raines because of the weird mesmerizing hold Raines has over Pinch.
Hey, NYT! Yoohoo! You still haven't 'fessed up about your boy Walter Duranty and all his years of lying and Soviet propaganda that appeared in your rag. Because of that, nobody in his right mind takes the Pulitzer seriously anymore.
``The New York Times,'' she said. ``You would expect more out of that.''
And that's what is so funny about this chicanery. Anyone with two neurons
to rub together knows that the reporting side on the NYT is so poisoned by
the editorial vision of what the news ought to be rather than what it is, nothing the
NYT prints can be read with any expectation of truth, including the logo with
its backwards 'Y.'
The big questions is: Which kind of corrections?
If the correction is simply an update on a spelling error caused by faulty police records, the correction is inconsequential.
On the other hand, if the correction involves made up quotes and other fabrications, then the correction is a sign of incompetence and dishonesty.
The NY Times has a lousy system if it cannot distinguish between Blair’s correction record and Clymer’s correction record.
Well, they no longer recall them to the Kremlin for show trials and banishment to the Gulag, so there must be some other reason. Perhaps in a rare unguarded moment, they realized they had spent their entire professional lives in the service of evil.
Howell Raines should absolutely be fired.
I've read the NYT every morning since I was 13 (I obviously didn't absorb much from the editorial page).
The Times used to be an indispensible news source. The Times printed stuff that didn't exist anywhere else. It was our first, and our only, newspaper of record.
Raines has ruined a national institution. And it wasn't his to ruin, to begin with.
Now you got me thinking,
Was Blair Boyd's Toy?
Remember, back then the major newspaper reporters REFUSED to investigate the Vince Foster case because they just accepted what the government told them and then stopped any independent investigation. And Peter Jennings was the one who displayed that PHONY photo of Foster holding a gun on ABC World News Tonight while acting like that should put a stop to the controversy.
Again, WHO were the major reporters on the Vince Foster case?
For instance, after the Post was forced to take back a February front-page story on the sniper case, Blair sent along an e-mail with the following subject line: "oooooooppppps." The missive proceeded to chide the Post's reporting and accused the paper of "stretching."
It seems that the Washington Post does not want to be left behind in the fabrication department... and Blair had a lot chutzpah
And he was castigated by the lamestream reporters as some sort of kook. Actually what Ambrose Evans-Pritchard did was FOOTWORK, something the other reporters REFUSED to do.
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