thedrifter
04-03-05, 10:04 AM
If The Times Were A Horse, They'd Shoot It
April 3, 2005
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by Burt Prelutsky
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As a rule, when I write a piece about all the mistakes my newspaper, the L.A. Times, makes, I have to wait a week or even two to compile a selection large enough to make it worth our while. It’s not that they don’t come up with a ready supply on a daily basis. Heck, UPS doesn’t deliver the goods with such regularity. But some of the goofs are simply too boring to mention, as when they get the days and times of certain events wrong or when they simply misspell someone’s name. Sometimes, too, the corrections run even longer than the original news items.
Today, however, the Times out-did itself. In the For the Record section devoted to these little mea culpas, they had 13 separate items, and nearly all of them are worth sharing. When people ask me why I continue to subscribe to the paper, my answer is that no matter how bad the news is, the Times will generally find a way to make it amusing. They started out slowly this morning, simply acknowledging that in a story about the Metrolink crash, they had confused Mount Washington with Cypress Park. They next confessed that the mountain from which Moses is believed to have viewed the Promised Land was really Mt. Nebo, not Mt. Nemo. An honest mistake. They simply confused a Biblical mountain with an animated fish.
Geography tripped them up once again when they called the river where Soviet and American forces met in 1945, calling it the Elba. It’s the Elbe. This time, they were obviously thinking of the island to which Napoleon was exiled. It could happen to anyone. It just happens more often to the folks down at the Times. In a story about the Grammy Awards ceremony, they claimed that Santana’s “Supernatural” album had won eight Grammy awards; it had won nine. It also stated that ‘N Sync had once won a Grammy; not true.
Regarding CNN’s Eason Jordan, it stated that in a New York Times opinion piece written in 2003, he admitted he didn’t allow his network to report all it had learned “during the intense early days of combat in Iraq, for fear that releasing certain confidential information would put lives in jeopardy.” In its correction, the Times only went so far as to state that the essay was about his network’s coverage in the years preceding the war as well as in the early days of the conflict. What was left out was the fact that in his original piece, Jordan made the shocking admission that for many years CNN had refrained from reporting anything that touched upon the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime, lest CNN lose its Baghdad bureau.
Perhaps this helps explain why the Times never once mentioned Mr. Jordan’s outrageous statement that the American military had targeted and killed a dozen journalists in Iraq. Not a single mention in fact until the day CNN forced him to resign! You have to wonder if this use of kid gloves where Mr. Jordan is concerned means that his next job will be with the Times.
In the obituary of Robert “Sunny” Rogers, Jr., he was said to have been the child of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. His mother was Roy’s first wife, Arlene. The Times claimed that the farm machine known as the Optimizer weighs 50,000 tons. Not quite. It weighs 50,000 pounds, apparently, not 100,000,000. The Times then informed us that Pope Paul IV died in 1978. It was actually Pope Paul VI. Which only proves that the Times has as much trouble dealing with Roman numerals as with Arabic.
And, finally, in an article in the Food section about Asian cooking, it erroneously translated Omakase as “today’s delicious one; I leave it to you,” when any fool knows that the literal translation means “entrusting,” and when written on a menu means “putting your trust in the chef.”
Now, wouldn’t you think that a newspaper that has as much trouble as the Times does just dealing with English would get on a bus and leave town before even thinking about taking on Japanese?
Burt Prelutsky
Ellie
April 3, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Burt Prelutsky
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As a rule, when I write a piece about all the mistakes my newspaper, the L.A. Times, makes, I have to wait a week or even two to compile a selection large enough to make it worth our while. It’s not that they don’t come up with a ready supply on a daily basis. Heck, UPS doesn’t deliver the goods with such regularity. But some of the goofs are simply too boring to mention, as when they get the days and times of certain events wrong or when they simply misspell someone’s name. Sometimes, too, the corrections run even longer than the original news items.
Today, however, the Times out-did itself. In the For the Record section devoted to these little mea culpas, they had 13 separate items, and nearly all of them are worth sharing. When people ask me why I continue to subscribe to the paper, my answer is that no matter how bad the news is, the Times will generally find a way to make it amusing. They started out slowly this morning, simply acknowledging that in a story about the Metrolink crash, they had confused Mount Washington with Cypress Park. They next confessed that the mountain from which Moses is believed to have viewed the Promised Land was really Mt. Nebo, not Mt. Nemo. An honest mistake. They simply confused a Biblical mountain with an animated fish.
Geography tripped them up once again when they called the river where Soviet and American forces met in 1945, calling it the Elba. It’s the Elbe. This time, they were obviously thinking of the island to which Napoleon was exiled. It could happen to anyone. It just happens more often to the folks down at the Times. In a story about the Grammy Awards ceremony, they claimed that Santana’s “Supernatural” album had won eight Grammy awards; it had won nine. It also stated that ‘N Sync had once won a Grammy; not true.
Regarding CNN’s Eason Jordan, it stated that in a New York Times opinion piece written in 2003, he admitted he didn’t allow his network to report all it had learned “during the intense early days of combat in Iraq, for fear that releasing certain confidential information would put lives in jeopardy.” In its correction, the Times only went so far as to state that the essay was about his network’s coverage in the years preceding the war as well as in the early days of the conflict. What was left out was the fact that in his original piece, Jordan made the shocking admission that for many years CNN had refrained from reporting anything that touched upon the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime, lest CNN lose its Baghdad bureau.
Perhaps this helps explain why the Times never once mentioned Mr. Jordan’s outrageous statement that the American military had targeted and killed a dozen journalists in Iraq. Not a single mention in fact until the day CNN forced him to resign! You have to wonder if this use of kid gloves where Mr. Jordan is concerned means that his next job will be with the Times.
In the obituary of Robert “Sunny” Rogers, Jr., he was said to have been the child of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. His mother was Roy’s first wife, Arlene. The Times claimed that the farm machine known as the Optimizer weighs 50,000 tons. Not quite. It weighs 50,000 pounds, apparently, not 100,000,000. The Times then informed us that Pope Paul IV died in 1978. It was actually Pope Paul VI. Which only proves that the Times has as much trouble dealing with Roman numerals as with Arabic.
And, finally, in an article in the Food section about Asian cooking, it erroneously translated Omakase as “today’s delicious one; I leave it to you,” when any fool knows that the literal translation means “entrusting,” and when written on a menu means “putting your trust in the chef.”
Now, wouldn’t you think that a newspaper that has as much trouble as the Times does just dealing with English would get on a bus and leave town before even thinking about taking on Japanese?
Burt Prelutsky
Ellie