Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Everybody saw this coming.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

The revolution will be supervised.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

T R E 4 5 O N

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

We still have time to mess this up!

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

In my day, never was longer.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

I really should read my own blog.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

You are here: Home / Politics / Media / Five editors

Five editors

by | 34 Comments

This post is in: 

In fairness, that’s less than one editor per serious factual error:

THE TIMES published an especially embarrassing correction on July 22, fixing seven errors in a single article — an appraisal of Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman famed for his meticulous reporting. The newspaper had wrong dates for historic events; gave incorrect information about Cronkite’s work, his colleagues and his program’s ratings; misstated the name of a news agency, and misspelled the name of a satellite.

[….]

Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

I wish the five editors who proof the posts here caught more of my errors too. Maybe I should be grateful they’re not combining to create new errors.

Reader Interactions

34Comments

  2. 2.

    Morbo

    OT again, I get the following error message on the main page and a derivative of it in threads:

    WordPress database error: [Got error 28 from storage engine]
    SELECT t.*, tt.*, tr.object_id FROM wp_terms AS t INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON tt.term_id = t.term_id INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id WHERE tt.taxonomy IN (‘category’, ‘post_tag’) AND tr.object_id IN (24887, 24884, 24879, 24876, 24874, 24870, 24867, 24865, 24860, 24855, 24850, 24544, 24832, 24826, 24823) ORDER BY t.name ASC

    Also one above the recent posts and one where the blogroll should be.

  3. 3.

    Punchy

    Wow….it fiannally happened. Your site is officially a mess on my work computer. in fact, I’m currently typing over ads, so I ave no idea if i’ve misspelled anything.

    Somethings very amiss.

  4. 4.

    General Winfield Stuck

    Site has gone screwy for me this morn./ comments have much space between them. Maybe commenting will help.

    Maybe I should be grateful they’re not combining to create new errors.

    This error will be corrected.

  5. 5.

    Joe Beese

    Remind me again why we’re supposed to be concerned that newspapers are going out of business?

  6. 6.

    Joey Maloney

    Looks like John decided to merge Balloon Juice with our old favorite blog, “WordPress Error”.

    I, for one, welcome our new SQL overlords.

  7. 7.

    JGabriel

    Clark Hoyt:

    Alessandra Stanley, a prolific writer much admired by editors for the intellectual heft of her coverage…

    DougJ, how could you not quote that? I mean, that’s the funniest damn thing in the whole story – using ‘Alessandra Stanley’ and ‘intellectual heft’ in the same sentence.

    Of course, like many funniest things, it’s also the saddest.

    .

  8. 8.

    Zifnab

    @Joe Beese:

    Remind me again why we’re supposed to be concerned that newspapers are going out of business?

    Because even a little quality reporting and mainstream distribution of information is better than none at all.

    And, really, are you going to compare the NYT or the WaPo to CNN / FOX / MSNBC? At least you had the option of reading something other than “Michael Jackson blah blah blah!” if you flipped past the front page.

  10. 10.

    ChrisB

    The public editor was a little too sympathetic for my taste in explaining how the mistakes happened but his summary of the fiasco was to the point:

    The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.

    Ah yes, the newspaper of record.

    The public editor went on to report that the writer, Alessandra Stanley, had so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned her own copy editor to fact check her stories. Her error rate went down “precipitously” and stayed low after the arrangement was discontinued but now she will get special editing attention again.

    And yet, despite this and all the other problems that critics of the Times have noted, I essentially root for it to provide the journalism I expect of it.

  13. 13.

    The Grand Panjandrum

    Got the following error when I came to the Balloon Juice homepage. Cut and pasted here.

    WordPress database error: [Got error 28 from storage engine]
    SELECT t.*, tt.*, tr.object_id FROM wp_terms AS t INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON tt.term_id = t.term_id INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id WHERE tt.taxonomy IN (‘category’, ‘post_tag’) AND tr.object_id IN (24887, 24884, 24879, 24876, 24874, 24870, 24867, 24865, 24860, 24855, 24850, 24544, 24832, 24826, 24823) ORDER BY t.name ASC

    This is error at the top of the page when I came to this post. Cut and pasted here.

    WordPress database error: [Got error 28 from storage engine]
    SELECT t.*, tt.*, tr.object_id FROM wp_terms AS t INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON tt.term_id = t.term_id INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id WHERE tt.taxonomy IN (‘category’, ‘post_tag’) AND tr.object_id IN (24887) ORDER BY t.name ASC

  14. 14.

    Incertus

    @ChrisB: Her error rate went down “precipitously” and stayed low after the arrangement was discontinued but now she will get special editing attention again.

    Wouldn’t it be more cost-effective to hire someone who didn’t fuck up on a regular basis?

  15. 15.

    Sebastian Dangerfield

    Ever consider getting this blog off of WordPress. This is the buggiest blog I read. Today’s bugs are the header at the top with the error message posted above, plus the ads obscuring the content. Some days it just doesn’t load or loads really slowly. What up? I like to read this blog, but you sure don’t make it easy.

  16. 16.

    The Grand Panjandrum

    So this is what happens when you write mean things about GE? Whoa! I thought Jack Welch was retired. Or was Glenn Beck right about the goverment taking over our computers? Scandalous, I say. Scandalous.

    This has to be good news for John McCain.

  17. 17.

    ChrisB

    @JGabriel: Yes, several of the commenters on the Times’ website were not just critical of Stanley but also ridiculed the entire notion of bringing intellectual heft to the coverage of television.

  18. 18.

    geg6

    Okay, I’m getting the same error message as everyone else. This is some crazy formatting going on here on BJ today.

  19. 19.

    Incertus

    I’m not getting ads obscuring the content–I’m just getting a lot of space between comments. Firefox on a Mac Powerbook G4, if that helps.

  22. 22.

    asiangrrlMN

    @JGabriel: Ha! I read that as “Alessandra Stanley has great heft” which made perfect sense to me as her writing is full of SOMETHING (though not intellectual thought).

    @Incertus: Fuck yeah! I second this. Why have two people doing the job of one?????

    I’m getting the error message and the biiiiiig spaces between comments, but not the ads problem. I’m on Google Chrome.

  23. 23.

    yellowdog

    Anybody else getting

    Bad Behavior has blocked 15058 access attempts in the last 7 days

    about halfway down the page? In addition to the spacing issue and the header. But I’m not having trouble with the ads.

    Firefox 3.5.1 on a PC with Windows XP.

  27. 27.

    Michael D.

    @inkadu: I know how you feel. We pay our taxes directly to John Cole! We expect everything to operate 100% smoothly at all times.

    John: Don’t know know that this site is not just your hobby? You actually owe us uninterrupted, error-free access at all times.

  29. 29.

    tommy

    many errors :

    WordPress database error: [Got error 28 from storage engine]
    SELECT t.*, tt.*, tr.object_id FROM wp_terms AS t INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON tt.term_id = t.term_id INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id WHERE tt.taxonomy IN (‘category’, ‘post_tag’) AND tr.object_id IN (24887) ORDER BY t.name ASC
    Balloon Juice

  31. 31.

    steve s

    “And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.”

    Like some kind of Error Voltron.

  32. 32.

    Cookie Monster

    IF the error 28 is being returned from MySQL, then one of your disks is full. (“No space left on storage device” or something like that — it’s from memory, so it may not be verbatim).

  33. 33.

    CalD

    If the NYT paid a little more attention to fact-checking, there’s a fair chance the Iraq War would not have happened.

  34. 34.

    Darkrose

    Stanley was the cause of so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts.

    Why does this woman still have a job?

Comments are closed.