Wordsmoker

If you’re anything like me, you read the acknowledgments,  pay attention until all of the credits have rolled, and regularly check your newspaper for admissions of past errors.  The New York Times regularly posts corrections when they misspell the middle name of an article’s  photographer, or the name of the town in which an unindicted co-conspirator attended high school.

The Times demonstrated its commitment to accuracy on Saturday by printing the following:

An article in some editions on Wednesday about the disappearance, and safe return, of an elderly Manhattan woman with Alzheimer’s misstated the frequency of her son’s visits from his home in New Jersey. The son, William Zengel, visits his mother, Betty Zengel, about twice a week, not once a month.

Daphne Merkin penned an article essentially calling Bernie Madoff’s victims saps – without mentioning that her brother was implicated in the scandal for allegedly defrauding investors of over $2 billion that he funneled Madoff’s way.  The Times dithered over whether to clarify her obvious conflict of interest.  Times editors were aware of the egregiously high error rate  in Jayson Blair’s articles for more than 3 years before his plagiarism and fabrications finally brought him down.

But the Times will not let stand the implication that a boy doesn’t love his mama.

Image via blog.pentagram.com.