Red Face!

NYT Chastises Itself

Error-ridden Cronkite obit was embarrassing.

The fearless Clark Hoyt, public editor of The New York Times, casts a rather disapproving eye against his own paper this weekend, drawing attention to the numerous mistakes warranting correction in a July 22 article hailing Walter Cronkite. Alessandra Stanley wrote the error-ridden appraisal of the newsman, who, ironically, was stringent in his own methods of reporting, and the piece contained seven mistakes, including the claim that Cronkite stormed the beaches on D-Day (he was actually in a B-17 bomber) and the wrong dates of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death and the moon landing. Because 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” the “authority of a newspaper” was undermined, writes Hoyt. Meanwhile, Stanley, who was writing another article under deadline at the time and didn’t fact-check her piece, says, “This is my fault,” and, “There are no excuses.”