For most of its life, The New York Times has tried to correct its errors. These efforts have not always been perfect.
Adam Nagourney, a New York Times reporter since 1996, is the author of “The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism.”
For most of its existence, The New York Times corrected errors of spelling and facts with a sentence or two, usually tucked inside the newspaper. It wasn’t until it was well into its second century that the paper began to dig deeper into its own lapses and explain its mistakes to readers, or at least some of them. Corrections moved to more prominent positions, typically Page 2 or the front of the second section, and sometimes even to the front page.
One of the first signs of this new era came in the early 1980s, when Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor at the time, created the “editors’ note,” designed, he said in a memo announcing the new policy, to “amplify articles or rectify what the editors consider significant lapses of fairness, balance or perspective.” Rosenthal wrote one of the first notes himself in 1985 after he objected to what he said was the snide tone of a Times story about a friend, Mortimer Zuckerman, the publisher and real estate developer. “Through opinionated phrases and unattributed characterizations, the article established a tone that cast its subject in an unfavorable light,” said the note, which was unsigned.
By 1987, under a different executive editor, Max Frankel, The Times published a correction of more than 1,200 words — as long as many news stories — addressing mistakes in an article that recounted the congressional testimony of Lt. Col. Oliver L. North about the Iran-contra scandal. This appeared on July 13, 1987, under a headline that ran across two columns of the front page: “A Correction: Times Was in Error on North’s Secret-Fund Testimony.”
The remedy may have seemed excessive. “I wouldn’t have insisted on putting a correction on the top of Page 1 to make a point,” Joseph Lelyveld, whom Frankel later named his managing editor, told me years later for a book I wrote on the modern history of The Times.
