Why No Correction?

I noted last Thursday that the New York Times had falsely accused John McCain of making an “embarrassing mistake” during Tuesday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. The Times said that McCain’s “mistake” was saying “that Iran was training Al Qaeda in Iraq.”

In fact, McCain said no such thing. I reproduced the transcript of all of McCain’s comments and questions during that hearing to demonstrate that the Times’s accusation was a pure fabrication.

We know the Times is aware of its mistake, since many Times employees read our site. Yet, for some reason, the paper has not yet corrected its error. It has run a considerable number of corrections in the meantime, like this one from today’s edition:

The Popular Demand listing in the Most Wanted chart on Monday, about viewers of baseball-related Web sites, referred incorrectly to the duration of the baseball season. It begins and ends in 2008; it is not “the 2008-9 baseball season.”

So, why has the TImes not corrected the charge it falsely leveled against McCain? Hard to say. I wrote the paper’s Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, to ask. You might consider doing that too. His email address is [email protected].

UPDATE: A responsive email says to send requests for corrections to [email protected].

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses