The Times corrects an editing error!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2016

A very peculiar newspaper: The New York Times is a very peculiar newspaper. A few quick examples:

Yesterday's front-page report about Donald J. Trump struck us as very odd. The report began with Donald J. Trump's peculiar attack against Boeing.

By now, it seems fairly clear that Trump's fact-challenged, jumbled tweet was a flash response to criticism from Boeing's CEO. But if you read the part of the Times report which appeared on the paper's front page, you received no such impression.

Instead, Trump was profiled semi-heroically, By paragraph 3, his tweet was being compared to JFK's stand against the steel bosses way back when. Let's quote Shear and Drew, who posed as Gloss and Spun:

"For perhaps the first time since President John F. Kennedy took on the steel industry in the early 1960s, the heads of big American companies are being confronted by a leader willing to call them out directly and publicly for his policy and political aims."

Inside the paper, the reporters created a jumble all their own as they tried to paraphrase Trump's tweet and sort out the actual facts. This is a very strange newspaper. But then, what else is new?

This morning, the Times has published an astounding report by Amanda Ripley about the new Pisa scores. We'll postpone that journalistic disaster until tomorrow, noting only 1) that Ripley seems to be a virtual cult member at this point, and 2) that the Times has apparently decided to disappear the Timss and discuss the Pisa alone.

The Times is very odd. If we wanted to bait Kevin Drum, we'd blame it on high lead content in the water when the reporters and editors were young.

We could do it, but it would be wrong. (Truthfully, the Times makes us wonder. Drum has noted that lead exposure was much higher when today's adults were kids.)

The Times is a very strange paper. On Saturday, we plan to discuss one of its Book Review's amazing but revealing picks for ten best books of the year. For today, let's puzzle over a minor but fascinating point—the official correction which appeared on yesterday's op-ed page.

Initially,we were struck by the correction because the errors it corrected seemed to be so large. We were also struck by a lack of parallel construction in thecorrection, and by a murky claim we didn't understand.

Here's the correction as it appeared in yesterday morning's paper. Everybody makes mistakes, but the errors being corrected here seem to be very large—and something seems to be missing:

Correction in hard-copy New York Times, 12/7/16: Because of an editing error, an Op-Ed essay on Friday about Donald Trump's efforts to keep jobs in the United States misstated the change in auto sector employment in both the United States and Mexico between 2007 and 2015. In Mexico, jobs grew to 558,000 from 405,000, not to 675,000 from 174,000. In the United States, auto jobs declined to 762,000 from 828,000. The article also misstated the plans by Detroit car companies to invest and hire employees in Mexico. Ford and General Motors plan to invest a combined $9.1 billion and hire 12,200 more workers; Detroit car companies are not planning to invest $30 billion and hire 30,000 more workers.

The correction appears the same way on-line. Below, we'll show you the lengthier version of the correction which appears on Nexis.

Those errors seem very large. We don't know what kind of "editing error" could have produced such howlers, nor does the Times seem inclined to explain.

Beyond that, information has been omitted from the correction concerning auto jobs in the United States. Based upon the original text in last Friday's hard-copy Times, here's how that correction would have appeared had parallel construction prevailed:

Correction as it should have appeared in order to acknowledge the full sweep of the errors: Because of an editing error, an Op-Ed essay on Friday about Donald Trump’s efforts to keep jobs in the United States misstated the change in auto sector employment in both the United States and Mexico between 2007 and 2015. In Mexico, jobs grew to 558,000 from 405,000, not to 675,000 from 174,000. In the United States, auto jobs declined to 762,000 from 828,000; auto jobs did not increase to 900,000 from 828,000. The article also misstated plans by Detroit car companies in Mexico. Ford and General Motors plan to invest a combined $9.1 billion and hire 12,200 more workers; Detroit car companies are not planning to invest $30 billion and hire 30,000 more workers.

Jeez! The original piece was crammed with large mistakes. How did an editor cause that?

We were struck by the size of the errors; by the claim that an editor caused them; and by the lack of parallel construction in the correction. (The original erroneous information was included for Mexican jobs but not for jobs in the U.S.)

Then, we saw this same correction as it appears at Nexis. Two extra lines appear at the end, creating a bit of a puzzler:

Correction as it appears beneath the column on Nexis: This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the change in auto sector employment in both the United States and Mexico between 2007 and 2015. In Mexico, jobs grew to 558,000 from 405,000, not to 675,000 from 174,000. In the United States, auto jobs declined to 762,000 from 828,000. The article also misstated the plans by Detroit car companies to invest and hire employees in Mexico. Ford and General Motors plan to invest a combined $9.1 billion and hire 12,200 more workers; Detroit car companies are not planning to invest $30 billion and hire 30,000 more workers. The article also misstated the state tax incentives given to Carrier to keep 800 jobs in Indiana. Carrier was given $7 million over 10 years, not $700,000 a year.

We swear that's what it says. "Carrier was given $7 million over 10 years, not $700,000 a year!"

Presumably, the Times supplied that longer correction to Nexis, then thought better of those last two lines. For what it's worth, that final line may give a slightly false impression of what the original column said.

As it turned out, the column in question was written by Steven Rattner. He's one of the bright regular panelists with the puzzling Mika and Joe.

In closing, let's review:

Giant errors appeared in the original piece; this was attributed to "an editing error." Then, the Times began composing corrections. Chaos took over from there.

Tomorrow: The Pisa cult