Like Catching A Greased Pig

New York Times Editor Gail Collins has been under criticism lately for failing to enforce her own accuracy policy, particularly in regards to her paper's most strident lefists, who have been permitted to get away with telling outright lies.
Today, she announcing her thinking and latest interpretation of what her definition of "accuracy" is, and her definition of what a "correction" is.

After reading it, I'm sure you'll conclude that she has her own definition of what the meaning of "is" is.

"The Op-Ed columnists, most of whom are limited to just over 700 words twice a week, have a particular problem with the Moby Dick genre of corrections since they eat up so much of their space. Nevertheless, in the four years that I've edited these pages I've never had a columnist refuse to make a correction, no matter how complicated. (To set yet another record straight, Frank Rich made a good faith effort to correct his FEMA-friendship error within a subsequent column but was castigated for failing to follow procedure and put the fix at the bottom of his piece, following the word CORRECTION. Frank, who never hesitates to amend errors, was writing for another part of the paper when we clarified, publicized and chiseled into stone the current policy. He should have been briefed when he returned. He wasn't.)

A classic case of correction run amok involved a column that Paul Krugman wrote on Aug. 19 about the Florida recount in 2000 in which he said that two different news media groups reviewed the ballots and found that "a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore." That was incorrect. Paul tried to clarify things in his next column, but the public editor, Byron Calame, objected that since nothing in the second column was labeled a correction, the original error would survive in the permanent record.

Paul published a correction in his next column. Unfortunately, the correction was based on information published in The Miami Herald that was wrong and had never been formally fixed. Paul appended another correction to the Web version of his column, but asked if he could refrain from revisiting the subject yet again in print.

I agreed, feeling we had reached the point of cruelty to readers. But I was wrong. The correction should have run in the same newspaper where the original error and all its little offspring had appeared. Here it is:

CORRECTION

In describing the results of the ballot study by the group led by The Miami Herald in his column of Aug. 26, Paul Krugman relied on the Herald report, which listed only three hypothetical statewide recounts, two of which went to Al Gore. There was, however, a fourth recount, which would have gone to George W. Bush. In this case, the two stricter-standard recounts went to Mr. Bush. A later study, by a group that included The New York Times, used two methods to count ballots: relying on the judgment of a majority of those examining each ballot, or requiring unanimity. Mr. Gore lost one hypothetical recount on the unanimity basis."

Clearly, if Paul Krugman (and Gail Collins) were capable of simply admitting error and did not descend into such weaselisms, this probably would have blown over. But, now that Gail Collins has joined her own Rich and Krugman in slippery language, the readers are faced with a challenge similar to that experienced by contestants in a greased pig contest at the local fair.