This is the last entry in my collection of NY Times apologies. There is no way to possibly top this: The NY Times apologizes at great length about the mistakes it made in Walter Cronkite’s obituary and another article about him. It’s pretty open and names several people who, for a variety of reasons, did not do their jobs properly.
But what is worse are the comments; they’re simply brutal. And I don’t feel that most of them are justified. Sure, making seven or eight mistakes in one story is pretty bad, especially for a newspaper with the NY Times’ reputation. But the mistakes are really rather minor, and they’re obviously embarrassed, so I don’t get what all the outrage is about. Especially because these are comments on the apology, not the original story. I wonder how many readers would have been able to spot those mistakes, or took away wrong information from the article.
