RSSRescue this
Tom Bowler | April 12, 2009
Senator Benjamin Cardin, Democrat from Maryland, has been in the news recently with proposals for allowing newspapers to operate as non-profits. The resulting tax breaks would make their survival in these uncertain times a bit less uncertain. Power Line offers a hilarious example of what Democrats hope to rescue.
As a long-time student of the New York Times Corrections section, I
can attest that the Times’ errors tend in a consistent direction–they
favor the left over the right, Democrats after Republicans. This
suggests a pattern to the paper’s failure to fact-check and exercise
editorial control. But the direction of the Times’ errors can be stated
more broadly: the Times is likely to err in believing a story that
would finish the thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if….” Imagine that the
paper’s reporters and editors are not just liberals, but liberal
stoners, and you get a clearer explanation of, for example, the famous
Fantasy Island correction.
These thoughts are prompted by a correction in today’s Times;
the paper evidently fell for a story about crows that have learned to
use vending machines. The correction is impossible to summarize; it’s
pretty opaque even when read in full. So here is the whole thing:
An article in the Year in Ideas issue [of the NYT Magazine] on Dec. 14,
2008, reported on Josh Klein, whose master’s thesis for New York
University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program proposed “a vending
machine for crows” that would enable the birds to exchange coins for
peanuts…
The dire situation in the newspaper industry, particularly for the New York Times and maybe the Washington Post, is not unconnected from the journalistic malpractice perpetrated upon us during recent presidential campaign. When a company can’t sell its product, you have to allow for the possibility that the product sucks. The key ingredient In journalism’s product is credibility, but time and again the Times destroys its own.
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