A lot of people are wagging their fingers at the mea culpa admitted yesterday by The New York
Times. Frankly, some of the finger-waggers seem to be piling on, not that the errors don’t deserve
a more thorough airing.
But it seems, too, that the Times has trouble learning from its own mistakes. The errors keep
piling up. Consider this morning’s headline on the front page: “Kissinger Tapes Describe Crises, War and
Stark Photos of Abuse.” The photos referred to, as described in
the story’s second graf, are “the color photographs of the men, women and children killed in the
My Lai massacre in South Vietnam.”
Must the headline writer for this story and/or the Times’s front page editor be reminded that
victims of wanton mass murder are not victims of “abuse”? Will there be a correction or
clarification tomorrow about the inaptness of that headline?
