On Sunday, January 20, 2002, in the Week in Review
section, the New York Times ran a long, self-congratulatory
piece about its Department of Corrections. The piece
stated The New York Times makes mistakes, great
and small, and goes to great lengths to correct them.
There is no doubt that the Times goes to great lengths
to correct small mistakes, such as misspellings
of names, misidentified positions in photographs and
incorrect ages of deceased persons in obituaries. But,
as Renata Adler cogently argues in her new book, Canaries
In the Mineshaft, no such effort is made with more substantive
errors. The trivial, as it often happens truly
comic corrections, persist in quantity. The deep and
consequential errors, inevitable in any enterprise,
particularly those with deadlines, go unacknowledged.
Through this omission, she concludes, The Times
conceals not just every important error it makes but
that it makes errors at all. If the Times does
not correct substantive errors, its correction
claim is a fictoid.
The opportunity to resolve this issue came when the
Times published a story on its Op ed page on January
2, 2002 by Tom Mangold about James Jesus Angleton in
1964. It stated Angleton had violated the constitutional
rights of Yuri Nosenko, a Soviet defector from the KGB,
by having him "arrested and thrown into solitary
confinement." The
story was demonstrably untrue: Angleton did
not order the arrest, imprisonment or hostile interrogation
of Yuri Nosenko, nor did he, or his counterintelligence
staff, even have jurisdiction over the Nosenko case,
which was the exclusive responsibility of the CIAs
Soviet Russia Division an entirely different part
of the CIA. The individuals who did participate in the
decision all described their role in sworn testimony
to the Rockefeller Commission and House Select Committee
on Intelligence. Even by Tom Mangold's own prior account
in his book Cold Warrior (page 189), the story in the
New York Times is untrue.
Although the editor was informed that the story was
false history, the Times published no correction. Adler
thus is correct that the claim the Times corrects all
errors great and small is a fictoid.
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