Ranking the New York Times's worst reporters

Jack Fuller, a former Chicago Tribune publisher, once suggested that newspapers should give reporters batting averages. "Reporters who do not meet the simple standard of accuracy should not be taken seriously, however stunning their work may appear to be in other respects," he wrote. "Newspapers should overcome their reluctance to use quantified performance measures and begin rigorously counting up their accuracy score." When Fuller presented his plan informally to a group of editors, one dubbed it "insane."

Maybe so. Serious journalists rarely make correction-worthy mistakes. A rate of two or three errors per hundred stories is about par for most. But then there are the outliers: those who make no mistakes, and those who make very many. So who are the sloppiest reporters at the paper of record?

Radar spent three months slogging through the New York Times's archives from June 2005 to March 2007. We calculated the correction rate by first narrowing the field of stories to those with single bylines. Then we divided the number of screw-ups attributable solely to reporter error (those due to editing or in headlines, photo captions, or credits were excluded) by the number of stories written by that reporter within the timeframe. What did we find? To the Gray Lady's credit—and our mild disappointment—the great majority of corrections involved piddling mistakes like misspellings and wrong hometowns, which shouldn't be interpreted as incompetence. Nevertheless, the Times hates to make corrections, and corrections are what we have to judge her by. So herewith, a loosely scientific look at the best of the worst that the vaunted paper has to offer.

1. Alessandra Stanley (10.2 percent correction rate)

Stanley's fumblings are well-known to Times-watchers—including Gawker, an avid monitor. But while her correction rate is way above average, it's the carelessness—and occasional hilarity—of her missteps that has propelled her to the top of our list. In addition to incorrectly calling Everybody Loves Raymond "All About Raymond" and misnaming The Essential Bob Dylan "The Ultimate Bob Dylan," Stanley was one of the first journalists to trumpet—and mess up—Stephen Colbert's now well-known neologism, "truthiness." "Trustiness," she wrote in October 2005, "was [Colbert's] word of the day, he told viewers ... sneering at the 'wordanistas over at Webster's' who might refute its existence." Stanley, who oversaw the Times's Moscow bureau before becoming the Gray Lady's TV critic, spurred a political brouhaha in 2005 after she reported that Geraldo "nudged" aside an Air Force rescuer helping Katrina victims so he could do some hero-anchoring. Turns out, there was video footage that exonerated Geraldo: He hadn't made physical contact. Times editors saw no need to correct the situation until public editor Byron Calame objected, eventually prompting a clarification.

The trip-ups have continued apace; just recently, Stanley wrote that ABC's Charlie Gibson had covered Bush's State of the Union address "from his desk in New York" and "hasn't exactly overexerted himself in his new job" as that station's World News anchor. She even saw fit to point out that he was on vacation while rival Brian Williams was in Iraq. In fact, Gibson was in Washington for the State of the Union and hadn't had a vacation in 10 months. "There are glaring errors in Alessandra Stanley's column today," wrote ABC News Senior Vice President Jeffrey W. Schneider, who went on at length in an open letter to set the record straight. Stanley bolstered her claim to the crown last July, when she informed readers of "an incorrect rumor about Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez" in a review of Tabloid Wars. The incorrect rumor was about Mr. Affleck and Jennifer Garner. When you're getting incorrect rumors incorrect, something's got to be wrong (even if the Times didn't see fit to issue a correction).

2. Douglas Martin (25.8 percent correction rate)
Roughly one in four of Douglas Martin's stories were corrected over the period we reviewed. So why isn't he at the top of the list? Martin, a former foreign correspondent, is an obituary guy, and while he's certainly on accuracy's shit list, his errors are mostly forgivable: listing a deceased wife as a survivor, omitting surviving grandchildren, misstating the date of death (details, details). You also have to cut him some slack for his beat—the average civilian's memory isn't so great, especially when they're eulogizing the recently departed. Martin has, however, mistaken a mother for a sister and incorrectly rendered the Russian word for "partisan" as "partinski" (it's "partizan"). And in 2005, his obit for civil rights leader James Forman resulted in the following abashed correction: "Mr. Forman asked for $500 million for crimes perpetrated against generations of blacks, not 'by' them." Oops. To make matters worse, in 2000 the reporter was called out on charges of plagiarism in a Times editor's note. He had lifted passages almost verbatim from the London Telegraph and the Times of London for an obit of Vera Atkins, a British war hero, and then explained away the deed by claiming that filching passages was standard practice among foreign correspondents. "Having been a foreign correspondent, I probably got too lax," he told the Boston Phoenix's Dan Kennedy. "I definitely won't be in the future." We've got our fingers crossed.

3. Sheryl Gay Stolberg (10.6 percent correction rate)
Stolberg, who replaced Elisabeth Bumiller as the NYT's White House correspondent last summer, clocked in with an impressive 20 corrections during our study period. Most of her slips were garden-variety: a misspelled name here, a misplaced senator there. Unfortunately for Sheryl, high-profile beats bring high-level scrutiny. In a story about pork-barrel politics, Stolberg, who was a medical and science reporter for the Times before moving into politics a few years ago, wrote about allocations of $400 million to an aquarium in Connecticut and $750 million to the Missouri Forest Foundation to bolster the notion that congressional earmarks might be out of control. Turns out, it was $400 and $750 thousand.

She also reported last October that Tom Delay "remains on the ballot" in the Texas district he once represented. He's not. And when Michael V. Hayden was going through Senate confirmation hearings for CIA chief, he said Congress should have been told earlier of the White House's domestic wiretapping program, which he oversaw when he headed the NSA. "If you want people at the crash," he said, "you've got to put them on the manifest," a quote Stolberg rendered as: "If you want people with the craft, you've got to put them on the manifest." But then no one knew what the hell he was trying to say in the first place. When Samuel Alito was undergoing confirmation hearings, Stolberg reported that the major polls showed a majority of Americans supported his confirmation. The reality: only one major poll supported the claim. And Sheryl, if we've said this once, we've said it a thousand times: Senator Michael D. Crapo is from Idaho, not Wyoming.

4. Katharine Q. Seelye (9.3 percent correction rate)
Seelye, who recently moved from the newspaper business beat to become an online political writer, is often tripping over herself. When Knight-Ridder put the Philadelphia Inquirer (where Seelye once worked) and Daily News up for sale last year, she wrote that the papers were expected to fetch $600,000, a significant savings over the $600 million asking price. In another slip-up, she said that the former owner of the Dallas Times Herald had let the paper "die" when he sold it long before it went out of business. Seelye also reported that the New Orleans Times-Picayune suspended publication for three days after Katrina when, in fact, the paper had famously continued publishing online. But we saved the best for last: Seelye, who covered Clinton in 1992, Dole in 1996, and Gore in 2000, once managed to misspell the family name of the New York Times's owners: It's Ochs-Sulzberger (with an e). Now that's an awkward elevator ride.

5. Jon Pareles (5.7 percent correction rate)
Any music critic will occasionally misidentify or misattribute an album or song, and Pareles can't be faulted much for that. He wrote, for example, that pianist Marcus Roberts wrote "New Orleans Blues," which he performed at a Katrina benefit in 2005. It's actually a classic Jelly Roll Morton tune. No biggie. But Pareles has also churned some doozies. The premise of his 2005 assessment of the band Broken Social Scene was that they were part of a burgeoning rock scene in Montreal. The article gushed about the city's "momentum" and the band's "Montreal exuberance." The band, of course, isn't actually from Montreal. The correction: "While a vibrant Montreal music scene indeed exists ... Broken Social Scene is not part of it; the band is based in Toronto."

6. John Rockwell (7.5 percent correction rate)

Rockwell, the Times's former chief dance critic, often gets confused about names and minor details. When he wrote about the Lincoln Center Festival three times in July 2005, he never disclosed that he took part in the festival's founding. Rockwell had been at the Times for 22 years, according to the paper, before joining forces with Lincoln Center in 1994 (he rejoined the paper in 1998). Aside from that, Rockwell hasn't made many significant errors over the past few years, though in a review of a music and dance performance in 2005, he wrote that one performer wore "sensible shoes." Actually, he was barefoot.



7. Roberta Smith (6.5 percent correction rate)

Smith, an art critic, had a respectable correction average, but she also had a high number of corrections. How? She wrote a lot of stories, including scads of listings and blurbs. Her slip-ups included stating the High Renaissance happened in the late 1500s and early 1600s (a century too late), attributing a work in a Harlem exhibit to the wrong artist, and identifying chocolate frosting used in a piece as ketchup. She made six errors in a story about Pixar in 2005, including misidentifying a character in The Incredibles, then crediting that character to the wrong actor, not to mention claiming creative chief John Lasseter founded Pixar, when in fact Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull started it. In a story about art galleries' ever-changing role in the art world before last year's Whitney Biennial, she mistakenly said one artist's work had been accepted when it had been rejected and left out another artist who had actually been invited. And when she announced the opening of the Biennial in February, she got the day wrong. Most recently, Smith wrote that a Peruvian statue of the baby Jesus showed him holding half of a heart in his left hand. It was half of an avocado.

8. John Markoff (9.2 percent correction rate)

Markoff, who reports on computers, software, and the Silicon Valley tech industry, has a decently high boo-boo rate, but his mistakes are almost always minor, and even then, they're often so geeky as to be inaccessible to the average human. He wrote, for example, that Linus Torvalds had incorporated code from Andrew S. Tannenbaum's Minix operating system when he created the Linux kernel, the nerd Rosetta Stone. Torvalds, in fact, borrowed no Minix code ... Outraged? There were a few more-easily-
understood corrections, however, like when Markoff understated the going retail price for Windows XP (as $99 when it was $199).



9. Byron Calame (9.3 percent correction rate)

While Calame's byline showed up only 43 times in the period we examined, four of those came with corrections. Given that the Times carved out the public editor position in response to the Jayson Blair scandal, it's a tad disconcerting that he got one detail wrong when he wrote about it as the new public editor, stating that Blair's performance hadn't been evaluated when he was at the Times metro desk from 2001 to 2002. It had. It's also curious that Calame, a former Wall Street Journal editor whose kid-glove performance at the Times has been criticized in some quarters, doesn't appear to have a firm grasp on how many people subscribe to the New York Times. In 2005, he wrote that the "Sunday edition has 1.7 million paying subscribers," a number that referred to its paid circulation, which includes both newsstand sales and home delivery. The man is obviously out of control.

10. Damon Darlin (9.5 percent correction rate)

Darlin, a business reporter, didn't make what you might call serious errors. But he did make a good number of them. He calculated, for example, that you'd need to save about $1,000 per month with 7 percent monthly returns to get $500,000 in 18 years for your kid's college education. More like $1,200 with 7 percent annualized returns, idiot! In an even more egregious display of very minor mistakery, he mixed up William R. Hewlett and David Packard's roles in starting Silicon Valley and botched a description of the pioneers who invented integrated circuits. Darlin made five errors in an article about McClatchy's sale of The San Jose Mercury News, the whopper of which was a claim that Silicon Valley's tech jobs were up to pre-bubble-burst levels when, in fact, the region had only regained about 10,000 of the 178,000 jobs it lost after the dot-com bust in the late 90s. And last September, when the HP news-leak investigation scandal hit, Darlin reported that a Timesman named John Markoff (sound familiar?) was a target of the company's gumshoes. He wrote that a lawyer for AT&T disclosed that information; actually, it came from California's attorney general's office.