Thursday, July 23, 2009

Top Quality Journalism despite cutbacks! ...??

2) How do you know when newsroom cuts are affecting what ends up on your doorstep? When you see a correction like this one printed in the New York Times this week:

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite's career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite's coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. "The CBS Evening News" overtook "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents' reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of "The CBS Evening News" in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, I get it. The Gray Lady really does need copy editors and fact checkers, don't they? How embarrassing....

Peter T said...

Maybe the triumph of the internet is first draining the finances of the competitors that they can't pay fact checkers anynmore and then letting them compete with the internet on a lower leveled playing field where they can't win, because the internet is free.