MEDIA MISTAKES? Byron Calame, public editor of The New York Times, wrote a piece recently about how a faulty Page One story went unchallenged. He notes that despite a questionable premise, the story went uncorrected for a week, and even provoked a piece of art on the Times' op-ed page. Calame's piece gives us a tiny bit of insight into editorial mistakes and correction policies in the media, particularly when challenged from the outside. You get the sense of a behemoth bureaucracy in motion, difficult to head off, harder yet to correct. The Times itself collected some of its more ridiculous errors in its book Kill Duck Before Serving a few years ago. But less amusing is what law professor Eric Muller found. In early May, he heard Fox News' Judge Andrew Napolitano telling a story meant to illustrate how out of control the federal government's commerce-governing powers have become. Though Muller researched the supposed case Napolitano reported and found nothing in the legal archives, and asked Napolitano for more details, Napolitano has yet to respond.
posted on May 25, 2006 - View this thread