from the New Yorker
Wow - big week for corrections. First the New York Times had to 'fess up to a double whammy: A subject in last week's cover story on women who had served in Iraq had not, it turns out, actually been in Iraq. The woman, Amorita Randall, had made it all up, including being injured in an IED attack. The military had told the Times that it had had no record of the attack or her injury, and that her unit had been deployed but not in combat. Those qualifiers were included in the article (which was cautiously-worded where the woman was concerned). After the article ran, the Times learned that only half of Randall's unit had been sent to Iraq and that she had actually been in Guam. Said the NYT: "If The Times had learned these facts before publication, it would not have included Ms. Randall in the article."
The Times also got into an embarrassing situation with an essay in the March 4, 2007 Book Review, regarding the essay "Confessions of a Book Abuser," by Ben Schott, which turned out to have a numer of marked similarities to the essay "Never Do That to a Book," by Anne Fadiman. Both essays dealt with the treament of books, including "similarities" like referring to "dog-earing pages either at the top or at the bottom depending on referential purpose and to travelers who rip previously read sections from paperbacks and discard them before boarding an airplane." Both essays also began in European hotel rooms where indignant chambermaids disapprove of the author's book treatment. Coincidence? Sure - those Euros are nosy. And Schott stuck by his story. But still, per the Times: "Had editors been aware of Fadiman's essay, the Book Review would not have published Schott's." See both corrections online here.
Finally, a correction that is not online: Following the kerfuffle two weeks ago regarding Dana Goodyear's February article on Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation, wherein NYT poetry critic David Orr called into question Goodyear's characterization of the Poetry Foundation and her own relationship with the New Yorker as both a submitting poet and the former assistant to New Yorker editor David Remnick, the New Yorker has issued a small Editor's Note on the matter. It turns out that Goodyear, a poet herself, had submitted poems to Poetry for consideration. Goodyear herself disclosed in a parenthetical that she had "submitted poems in 1998, just before graduating from college; the editor at the time, [Joseph] Parisi, had the good judgment not to publish them." She did not, however, disclose an additional submission to Poetry in 2003, by which time she was an accomplished poet with numerous bylines in the New Yorker. Presumably, Goodyear would not be so quick to dismiss those latter works, which, according to the Poetry website, were also not published. 2003 is a long time ago in poet-years, and Goodyear is certainly quite accomplished in her own right. Even so, it's a disclosure that ought to have been made, somewhere along the line.
Corrections - March 25, 2007 [NYT]
The New Yorker - Letters Page (unlinked)
