Fraters Libertas

Send in the Gatekeepers

On Monday I wrote about an error appearing in the Sunday the New York Times regarding their characterization of a 30% decrease in the number of US military wounded in Iraq between 2004 and 2005 as being "much higher" in 2005. In the off chance the public editor doesn't read Fraters Libertas (except for the Atomizer posts), I also sent an email pointing out the discrepancy and requesting a correction.

Within seconds I go an automated reply with these assurances:

Thanks for your message to our Reader Comment mailbox. Your e-mail will reach the appropriate editor promptly. We are grateful to readers who take the time to help us report thoroughly and accurately.

Ordinarily a comment about news coverage will receive a further reply. And we do pay respectful attention to all messages, even those that are part of organized letter-writing campaigns, for which we are not staffed to reply individually. A correction generally takes two or three days to appear on Page A2, after fact checking.

I never got a personal reply to my inquiry (which means I'm now officially an organized campaign), but I do see the correction has been printed. And it looks like the damage runs deeper than I thought:

An article on Sunday about American military casualties in Iraq misstated figures in some copies for the American service members wounded in 2005 and 2004 as reported by the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, a nonprofit group that tracks American service members killed and wounded in Iraq. According to the group, 5,557 American service members were wounded in 2005, not 9,157; and 7,989 were wounded in 2004, not 7,956.

This is actually a different error than the one I pointed out. In my edition of the NYT, the casualty numbers were reported correctly, it was their news summary on page 2 that gave them an exactly opposite characterization. Now they're saying that the actual numbers reported in some editions were incorrect. Apparently by the time my edition went to print, those numbers had been corrected in the article, but they forgot to fix the summary. So post correction, yet another correction needed to be made. Which brings up the inevitable question, with gate keepers like this, who needs circus clowns?

Curious as to whether the post-correction correction needed a further correction, I Googled the source the NYT is blindly quoting as the definitive tabulator of US military casualties.

Iraq Coalition Casualty Count indeed does list the number of US military wounded in 2005 as 5,777 and for 2004 as 7,987. Although there are numerous tables and charts listed on the main page, it's easy to identify this information from the site, and cut and paste into a spreadsheet to confirm the calculations. Which makes me wonder how the NYT reporter, Dexter Filkins, and his gatekeepers produced the erroneous numbers in the first place. I ran a few other combinations but couldn?t come up with the 9,157 wounded in 2004 that was originally cited. Any enterprising bloggers who have time to figure out where they went wrong might uncover some hilarious insight about what part of "wounded" or "2005" the Times doesn't understand.

But, with that truncated, buried correction, I'm sure the editors and their apologists now feel that they've done their jobs. Wrong has been righted, and they can breezily moveon.org to other stories that reinforce their beliefs.

In reality, the error and bias linger on. The facts of the story they were pursuing should have produced the following headline and plot summary:

Casualties in Iraq down sharply in '05

I haven't seen that article yet. As the gatekeepers have demonstrated, in their judgment, good news like that isn't fit to print.