Unacceptable
Posted by Jeremy Long on July 26, 2009
How does this this lady still have a job at the New York Times?
Apparently, Alessandra Stanley, a NYT television columnist wrote a piece about Walter Cronkite’s life. The article she wrote contained seven errors about Cronkite’s life.
As a journalist I know what it’s like to make an error in a story. It has happened to me in the past and I’m sure it will happen to me in he future. Two things made me shudder when I found out the fallacies in Stanley’s article.
The first was the “mistakes” were quite large. I’m talking wrong dates. Something that could easily be fact-checked by “googling” it.
The second thing is that apparently, Stanley is an error prone writer.
A Columbia Journalism Review blog — Regret the Error Blog — wrote this about Stanley:
By my count in Nexis, she had fourteen corrections in 2008, twelve in 2007, and fifteen in 2006. Averaging just over a correction a month is not something to be proud of. But that’s still better than before she attracted so much attention. Stanley had twenty-three corrections in 2005, the year everyone noticed her predilection for error, and twenty-six in 2004. Perhaps the decline in corrections between 2005 and 2006 was in part due to the attention focused on her.
So, she gets a lot of things wrong. Again I’m not sure how “big” these mistakes were. For example in the Cronkite piece, Stanley misspelled a name. Hey it happens and I understand that.
But getting historical facts wrong like the date Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated and claiming Cronkite stormed the beaches on D-Day.
Katie Couric called Stanley out on her “Notebook” which airs on CBSNews.com. I found out about this crime on the Huffington Post. You can read everything for yourself here.
