At this point, my eyes bounced off the page, just like they bounce off the television screen whenever the president says anything. I didn't catch the lie, because I didn't read it in the first place. I therefore salute press critics like Robert Naiman and FAIR and Glenn Greenwald who can read NYT articles all the way to the end. I can't.
While we're on the topic of the bold embargo, did the Times lay off all the copy editors? "French and European diplomats"? When did France secede from Europe?
I did enjoy the last article in the news section of January 5, "Methods in a Cat Litter Ad Don't Pass a Judge's Smell Test" by Elizabeth A. Harris, which concerned a cat litter company suing another cat litter company for false advertising. The defendant claimed to have done 44 smell tests using "sealed jars of excrement" treated either with its cat litter or the plaintiff's cat litter to prove which company's product made the cat's product smell better. Skeptical of the science behind the smell tests, a federal judge ruled in a hearing that the suit could proceed. The article survived the editing process with some humor intact--a benefit of laying off a bunch of editors?--and I assume Harris is praying every night that she gets assigned to cover the actual trial, but any cat-owning reader was left wondering, "Why were they doing the smell tests on cat excrement, which doesn't smell at all two minutes after leaving the cat? It's cat urine that smells like you just gargled with toilet bowl cleaner. Why didn't they smell test the urine?"
Next I turned to the Corrections section on page 2. The best correction that day concerned "a type of bird that snow geese may try to displace when they arrive in the water of the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge in the wintertime. It is the white-fronted goose, not the white-footed goose. And the article referred imprecisely to the Tule goose. It is a subspecies of the white-fronted goose, not a separate species."
Let me be fair here. I've made lots of mistakes like that. Every journalist has, because the human brain is imperfect, especially when it has deadlines and quotas. Let him who could tell a white-footed goose from a white-fronted goose cast the first stone. I don't know anything about the reporter, Felicity Barringer, who wrote about the geese in question, but I imagine her as a Harvard graduate, a history major and veteran of the Crimson, and she's thinking, "I could have been sent to Paris with a big expense account to promote the next war. I could have been sent to Federal Court in Manhattan to smell cat litter. But nooooooooooooo. They sent me to a swamp. In central California. In the middle of winter. They freeze my ass, they freeze my pension, and they publicly humiliate me because I don't know one goose from another. Why didn't I go to law school?"
So let us heap no more shame on Felicity Barringer. Let us salute the Times for manning up and admitting a mistake. Surely it would run a correction in the print edition on Iran's non-bomb the next day, since they deleted the offending words from the online edition the same day they ran it. I mean, what's more important to get straight? Provoking war with a country of 74 million people under false pretenses, or a white-fronted goose?
No correction the next day. Nor the next day. Nor the next day. Nor the next day. Nor the next day.
Finally, on January 11, I noticed alerts by Naiman and FAIR that the Times' Public Editor, Arthur S. Brisbane, had addressed the issue in his blog. "The Times published 3,500 corrections last year, a huge volume that in itself requires a great deal of work to shepherd into print," said Brisbane. "I usually agree with its decisions about what to correct and not correct, although there are sometimes cases where The Times's judgment call and mine are not the same."
In one year, 3,500 corrections? Jesus. Have they considered hiring more journalists?
Brisbane went on to quote at length from the original IAEA report, trying to show that a reasonable person could conclude that IAEA was saying that Iran was definitely pursuing a nuclear weapon, and he linked to Washington Post ombudsman, Patrick B. Pexton, who has similarly been soaked with torrents of outrage from readers when the Post has "overstated" the case for the next war. But Brisbane did finally conclude in a 51%-on-this-side, 49%-on-that-side kind of way that "the readers are correct on this," and it's "important because the Iranian program has emerged as a possible casus belli."
That's a substantial fraction of a concession there. But "judgment call"? It's not even a disagreement. The Times knows that the information in the original article was false, and it knew it was false within a few hours of publication because it quickly deleted the false words from the online edition. What it hasn't done is correct in print false information that remains in print. Does a misidentified casus belli deserve as much attention as a misidentified goose or not?
Meanwhile, as I write these words, another Iranian nuclear scientist has been assassinated, and the Times is doing the same turgid dance between the truth and what's "fit to print." I can't even begin on that one. Let me just observe that there are two kinds of articles in the New York Times: those that have implications for America's imperial project, and those that don't have implications for America's imperial project. The ones with implications are unreadable. The ones without implications are about cat litter.
So if I worked on the business side of the Times and were looking at circulation plunge by the tens of thousands every quarter, I would be a little panicked about the attractiveness of the product. I would talk to the art department about getting rid of the color pictures that might be poisoning my neighbor's listless budgies. And if I were my neighbor's veterinarian, I would check to see if the budgies had learned to read.
CHARLES M. YOUNG is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored award-winning online alternative newspaper. His writing, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, DAVE LINDORFF, LORI SPENCER and LINN WASHINGTON, JR., can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
