THE NEW YORK TIMES TELLS IT LIKE IT WASN'T - AT 7:43 A.M. ET:  Reader Tom Wharton alerts us to a superb piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, which in turn reprints a remarkable correction published by The New York Times about a story written by its columnist, Alessandra Stanley:

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

The Times calls itself the newspaper of record.  Depends, I guess, on how accurate you want the record to be.

One thing about journalistic "corrections":  The press is perfectly willing to "correct" minor mistakes, even if there are several within a story.  It is entirely unwilling to correct major errors.  Reader Joseph J. Gallick refers us to Diana West, writing in The Washington Examiner, who notes, after all the eulogies to Cronkite, that the often-distinguished journalist got it wrong in his famous broadcast from Vietnam declaring a "stalemate," yet never corrected the record:

What may -- may -- have resulted from forgivable misimpressions due to the "fog of war" long ago crystallized into obdurate lies. Cronkite never clarified the record, never admitted that the Tet offensive -- the Vietcong's surprise holiday attack on cities across South Vietnam -- resulted in a military and political fiasco for North Vietnam.

This was becoming apparent even before the dust had settled in 1968, as we learn in Peter Braestrup's indispensable "The Big Story", one of the signal historical works of the 20th century, which meticulously analyzes the media's failure to assess Tet correctly as a defeat for North Vietnam.

COMMENT:  West is correct.  For more than four decades, Americans have lived with the myth that the Tet Offensive of 1968, which changed public opinion on the war, was a defeat for the United States and South Vietnam, when it actually was a spectacular victory.

When leaders in a profession get away with it, they are teaching a terrible lesson.  Judging by the journalism we have today, the lesson has been absorbed.

July 27, 2009