In the print edition of the New York Times this morning, Bill Kristol’s column noted the talk that John McCain may not have been in “the cone of silence” during Saturday night’s event at the Saddleback Church, and may have heard some of the questions before he took the stage. Kristol dismissed the talk out of hand, calling the suggestion from Obama campaign aides “astonishing,” and insisting there’s “absolutely no basis for the charge.”
Of course, as we discussed this morning, McCain wasn’t in a “cone of silence”; he was in a limo en route to the event while Obama was answering questions. Did McCain hear the questions in advance? I have no idea, but simply raising the question isn’t “astonishing” at all.
Clearly, there are more important political controversies, but the point is, Kristol’s column, once again, got specific factual claims wrong. As Tom Tomorrow noted, the Times gave the online edition of Kristol’s piece a little touch-up.
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context…. What they’re putting out privately is that McCain … may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.”
There’s no evidence that McCain had any such advantage.
In other words, it’s no longer “astonishing” and there is a “basis for the charge.”
This may seem like small potatoes, and to a certain extent, it is. But the New York Times is the paper of record, it’s op-ed page is the most valuable media real estate in the country for political opinion, and it’s hard not to notice a troubling trend — Bill Kristol, who never should have been hired in the first place, keeps making mistakes.
Indeed, with this morning’s online touch-up, the Times doesn’t even alert readers to the fact that the column was changed; it just quietly makes Kristol’s work less wrong than it was when it went to print.
Every writer makes mistakes; I’ve made plenty myself. But Kristol’s writing is pedestrian and predictable; the Times has editors and fact-checkers; and he’s only been on the job since January. And how many times has the Times been forced to run corrections relating to Kristol’s sloppiness? Based on a count from Amanda at TP
, we’ve seen three in the last eight months, and today’s error would be #4. (If you want to get picky about it, one of Amanda’s examples included two separate factual errors in the same column, which would make today’s mistake #5.)
Back in May, Glenn Greenwald had an item on the “sloppy, error-plagued and incomparably hackish columns” Kristol has produced. I half-expected the Times to start being more careful with his columns, to save him (and the paper) additional embarrassment. Apparently, that’s not happening.
Any chance the NYT’s editors hired Kristol to make conservative writers in general look bad?