Sunday, September 20, 2015

Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey

How are things on the Old Earth Creation front, Nation's Newspaper of Record?

The cover article on Aug. 30, about a trip around Lake Michigan, misstated the time period during which the lake was formed and the type of activity that caused it. And a correction in this space on Sept. 6 gave another incorrect figure for the time period and repeated the erroneous cause. The lake began to form about 15,000 years ago — not 20 billion years as the article noted, or 1.2 billion as the correction noted. And the formation stemmed from glacial activity, not from tectonic activity.

If the second date was wrong, how did the correction "note" it?

A news analysis last Sunday misstated the name of a cartoon character displayed at a Moscow diner. He is Porky Pig, not Porky the Pig.

I'm OK with, though not always ecstatic about, the Times's habit of setting "due to an editing error" blunders aside from the rest -- writers get enough heat from sources and the public as it is. But there are times when it would be nice to figure out where in the chain (south of Arthur the Sulzberger, I mean) we can pin the blame for some of the more amusing Times errors.

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