Stanley must be having the worst two weeks of her life. Hoyt — who's been on an absolute roll lately, taking on the mystical algorithms of the Weddings and Celebrations as well as the mysteries behind the Times' law-breaking, public-nuisance creating photographs — must've had something close to a coronary after seeing Stanley's now legendary Walter Cronkite appraisal, which was corrected not once, not twice, but three unbelievable times. Even Katie Couric laid into Stanley for utterly disgracing the memory of one of America's legendary news anchors at the Gray Lady. So Hoyt was next in line. And he gives Stanley's career an appraisal that basically amounts to something just short of "What the fuck were we all thinking?" in this week's public editor column, entitled How Did This Happen? Mr. Hoyt, the bamboo cane is yours:

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not. But a more nuanced answer is that even a newspaper like The Times, with layers of editing to ensure accuracy, can go off the rails when communication is poor, individuals do not bear down hard enough, and they make assumptions about what others have done. Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

To the bullet points! Other choice quotes:

• Sam Sifton - the Times culture editor - calling Stanley's appraisal a "a disaster, the equivalent of a car crash."
  
  
• Stanley's full-on mea culpa: "'This is my fault,' she said. 'There are no excuses.'"
  
  
• The secret rankings of fuckup NYT writers. Like Mediaite, but obviously way better: "Until the Cronkite errors, she was not even in the top 20 among reporters and editors most responsible for corrections this year."
  
  
• The number of people specifically implicated by name in all of this: Lorne Manly, her editor. Copy editor Janet Higbie. Late-shift editor Nicole Herrington. Standards editor Craig Whitney. And Douglas Martin, who'd written the Cronkite obit before he died.
  
  
• Chip Cronkite — who'd actually warned the Times off of certain possibly-going-be-made errors before they were made — laughing it off: "Chip Cronkite seemed philosophical about all the errors. He said his parents had a joke ashtray with the inscription, 'Just give me the facts: I'll mix 'em up when I quote you.'"
  
  
• The public talk about Stanley's personal editor that she's been assigned, and now, has again. Back to those rankings: "For all her skills as a critic, Stanley was the cause of so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts. Her error rate dropped precipitously and stayed down after the editor was promoted and the arrangement was discontinued...Now, she has jumped to No. 4 and will again get special editing attention."
  
  
• Finally, the kicker: Clark Hoyt telling us how absolutely not-funny this is: "To The Times, this isn't a laughing matter. Whitney said: 'We cannot tolerate this, and have tightened procedures to rule out a recurrence. I have spoken with those involved, and other senior newsroom editors and I will monitor the implementation of these measures.'"

Actually, it's pretty hysterical: the top writers at the nation's most well-known newspaper need their own babysitters to make sure they don't fuck up the fact that Walter Cronkite did not, in fact, storm Omaha Beach. It's almost cute, like watching a one time all-star quarterback end up being spoon-fed baby food in a nursing home for The Olds while being reminded how Telstar is spelled correctly.

But not, because watching the inability of something to operate on its own is a fundamentally depressing experience.

How Did This Happen? [Clark Hoyt]

Couric, being a classy lady, doesn't mention the error-prone Times scribe by name, but we all know who she's talking about.

I had to smile albeit, a tad ruefully, and I think he would too when I saw The New York Times correcting a piece that had appeared following his death. The article contained not one, not two, but seven errors about his life and career.

She then goes on to recount a number of the errors. It's almost as if she's a woman scorned. Oh wait, didn't Stanley once say of Couric "at the first sound of her peremptory voice and clickety stiletto heels, people dart behind doors and douse the lights?" Oh yeah, she did! (PS—that article has a correction attached to it.)

Payback is a bitch, but Katie Couric is not, so she never makes it personal—especially considering, if this were a knife fight, Stanley would be lying on the ground bloody and defenseless. However, our Katie-poo does get in a few good zings.

So as we say goodbye to the Dean of TV news, let's all remember as journalists when we say "that's the way it is" - it really is.

In Stanley's case, we hope Couric is using the term "journalist" loosely.

Watch CBS Videos Online

The NYT ran one, smaller correction of this story immediately after it ran on Saturday, but they come back today with the smackdown:

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite's career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite's coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. "The CBS Evening News" overtook "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents' reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of "The CBS Evening News" in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International. (Go to Article)

1. Since everybody knew Cronkite was on the way out, wouldn't Alessandra—or maybe an editor!—check this, in advance?

2. Maybe Alessandra is a closet Wikipedia fan, and that's why she makes so many mistakes? But then we checked and Wikipedia actually has the correct dates for those events, not the ones she used. Alessandra Stanley would actually benefit by checking her facts on Wikipedia.

[NYT]

And the Times isn't happy about the three errors you made, either. Especially since today was Walter Cronkite Day, and you know, journalism's kinda fucked and all. Better pay fellas like him the res-pekt they deserve, yeah? Well, "peep" the correction, emphasis mine:

An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to a news organization for which Walter Cronkite worked. At the time, it was called United Press, not United Press International. The earlier version also misstated the date of the first moon landing; it was July 20, 1969, not July 26. And it misspelled Telstar.

Wow. They even started a sentence with a conjunction, which is akin to being slapped with something silly, like a squeak toy. Anyway: Stanley-Watch has [sic] returnxed! Good to have you back for the first time, babes.

Cronkite's Signature: Approachable Authority [NYT]

Update: Oh, wow. NYTPicker points out three more errors-one about the broadcasting team Cronkite did-or didn't-work with, one about Cronkite's first words when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon-they actually just landed in the lunar module-and one about his ratings. They also corrected a spelling mistake in my headline. Error terror begets error! According to them, this brings her into a 10 error-year, slightly under the 50 error-year they'd predicted. Is there somewhere we can place a wager on this kind of thing?

And perhaps the close: "Not all of her performances will stand the test of time, but what is worth remembering is how hard Farrah Fawcett tried."

There's that word again—"Tried."

Apparently some people interpreted that as an insult and lost sight of the rest of the piece, because overall we thought that the piece was, well, "fair and balanced." One thing to keep in mind, something apparently lost on those who wrote in to take issue, was that this was not Farrah Fawcett's New York Times obituary. Her obit is here. This was an analysis of her career, or as the Times puts it, "An Appraisal," and was therefore meant to be open to criticism.

But for the most part, Stanley's analysis on Fawcett's life and career leaned positive. Whether or not the Times should have waited a day to run anything containing criticism of a recently-deceased star (What's the protocol on this?) is open to debate, but at that point it's lost some of its newsworthiness. Regardless, read Stanley's piece and make your own judgment.

A Sex Symbol Who Wanted to be More [New York Times]

Alessandra Stanley is the New York Times TV critic, even though it's pretty much obvious that she hates television and doesn't really watch it that much. We mock her because she hates television so much that she doesn't even pay attention to things she is supposed to be reviewing for the most famous newspaper in the world, which leads to really embarrassing and stupid mistakes like "All About Raymond" or mistaking CNN's slogan for MSNBC's.

But more recently, she has been getting things mostly factually correct, as much as you can even judge the factual accuracy of a piece that claims that Joe Biden is Barack Obama's Paul Shaffer.

Ms. Stanley noticed that Conan O'Brien was going to bring his old sidekick Andy Richter with him to The Tonight Show, so she started thinking about sidekicks, and about the economy, and about blogs, and American Idol.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney may share some blame. He stretched the job description so far to fit his own agenda that the definition of "vice" lost its secondary meaning; at times during the build-up to the Iraq war, Mr. Cheney seemed more like Cardinal Richelieu than Tonto.

Joe Biden now has the title, the residence and the security detail, but the position has been dummied down. Mostly, President Obama treats him like a latter-day Paul Shaffer, humoring him briefly, then shunting him off-stage before he goes on too long.

Also she talks about Deal or No Deal and House and other non-talk shows that don't involve sidekicks, because they're not talk shows, and honestly no one has had sidekicks on talk shows since the '50s, with the two exceptions of old school Johnny Carson and ironically old-school Conan O'Brien. But then she mentions Batman because she's on a free-association roll!

We definitely prefer this new Larry King-esque stream-of-consciousness Alessandra Stanley to the old "getting everything wrong" one.

Stanley writes that we've all been so consumed with bitterly gossiping about Bernie Madoff and Rod Blagojevich and rich people shopping in secret that we've stopped talking about sad philanderers like John Edwards, Madonna (depending on what gossip you believe) and Eliot Spitzer. This is actually true!

But then she writes:

Geed trumps lust, and fraud is more fascinating than infidelity [—] it’s safe to say that the recession has arrived.

Greed trumps lust? Kind of a knee-jerk reaction (like clutching your pocketbook!), no?

We'll see.

It's really yet to be proven that the sex scandal is now passé. The Edwards scandal might have cooled off, but it's not like the Democratic politician has escaped its stain. There's just no fresh news.

Likewise with Spitzer, who still refuses to revisit the topic of his whoring.

Madonna's thing with Alex Rodriguez is a secondary story because she's Madonna. Twice divorced!

The only way to establish that people care less about sex is to wait for the next big, hot, juicy sex scandal to erupt and see what happens. It's hard to predict when such a story will, uh, come, but it's hilarious how Stanley glosses over the potential sex-and-journalism scandal at her own newspaper:

Caroline Kennedy is under tabloid attack, but the charge is presumption: even on TV, commentators openly scoff at her brief, somewhat stilted tour of upstate New York and complain that she is seeking appointment to public office with a queenly sense of entitlement.

And with a few more turns of the news screw, they could be talking about Kennedy in an entirely different, more familiar light.

Because of an editing error, the TV Watch Column on Wednesday, comparing coverage of Senator Barack Obama’s trip overseas with coverage of Senator John McCain, gave an incorrect title in some copies for a Frankie Valli song used in a video by the McCain campaign to mock reporters’ coverage of Mr. Obama’s trip. The song is “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” — not “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.”

Looks like her new dedication to caring enough to get things mostly right most of the time is paying off! (Oh, and the "forthcoming" correction was probably this one, which ran one day after that Stanley item. Hah.) [NYT]

Obviously some mistakes are never corrected, even when we make fun of them. Also:

Then again, this entire item could end up requiring an asterisk. "I'd hate to stand corrected, but I think your count could prove wrong," says Stanley. "There could be one coming in the next few days — [it's] still under study."

What is this about? Anyone?

“'Gossip Girl' focuses on worldly little girls who join forces against one another. The series, along with such like-minded shows as the MTV semireality show 'The Hills' and a cautionary senior edition, 'The Real Housewives of New York City,' are focused on friends, and most of all on frenemies. They are so postfemininist that they circle back not just to 'Mean Girls,' but to the pre-Friedan era of Clare Boothe Luce and Rona Jaffe.

"There is even a nod to Edith Wharton. Serena’s mother is named Lily, and she is engaged to a billionaire named Bart, a sly reference to Lily Bart, the heroine of 'The House of Mirth,' who is socially ruined by, among others, her manipulative BFF Bertha Dorset." [NYT]

Why can't Bush or any of his would-be successors just act like a president instead of trying to be funny? Because they have to prove they are not "elitist," Alessanda Stanley wrote in the Times:

Elitism is to the 2008 campaign as communism was to 1950s politics: a career-breaker. And pop TV is the antidote, a free platform to rub shoulders with viewers who only glancingly pay attention to the news. Making nice on a cooking program or game show is the macropopulist equivalent of knocking down pins in a bowling alley in Altoona, Pa., or belting down Crown Royal whiskey in a bar in Crown Point, Ind., only better: the setting, be it Rachael Ray’s kitchen or Howie Mandel’s array of suitcases on “Deal or No Deal,” is as familiar as home to millions of viewers. None of the presidential candidates want to be seen as snooty or overeducated, which must be why on Monday, all three provided taped greetings to wrestling fans watching “WWE Raw” on the USA network.

This is, of course, the mediocrity-celebrating, "I-just-want-a-president-I-could-have-a-beer-with" attitude that got Bush elected eight years ago and that voters were supposed to be totally over.

I sort of think the joke doesn't work with Alex Kuczynski given that she's no longer on staff and hasn't been for a loooooong time. Deborah Solomon is obviously a contract writer with the magazine, not a member of the union. Hence neither of them belong in your poll. And Amanda Hesser did quit, already. A couple of weeks ago. Anyway, I don't mean ot be all high and mighty about it, but it just seems to me that in general, if you are going to be merciless cunts, it would help to know what you're talking about.

And regarding Alessandra Stanley, and the post from yesterday... She is exactly the kind of Times writer Gawker ought to be championing, and instead you guys have been relentlessly kicking the shit out of her for three years, for every correction she ever gets, for her style, writing today that she should be forced to take a buyout...Obviously, she gets too many corrections, but she churns out (sometimes) as many as five columns a week, and is funny and irreverent not in the maer roshan sense of the word, but in the real sense of the word...Are you guys jealous? Did you just arbitrarily decide to be malicious to her? I totally get it with useless Bill Carter but with her, I find it totally mystifying.

Just saying.

Good points all, except for the lame (five columns a week! presumably written while dodging sniper fire?) defense of Alessandra Stanley, who clearly just hates her job. Kelefa Sanneh has never, to our knowledge, accidentally mentioned the hit single "Totally Out-There" from hiphop duo Charles Barkley. Maybe the architecture critic accidentally mistakes perforated parapets for plain ones every week but we're not a nation of architects, we're a nation of television viewers, and we notice when someone calls it "All About Raymond."

We freely own up to malicious cuntiness, though.

• Today's article, which claims that the Iraq war began in 2002, not 2003.
• Structuring an argument around the erroneous point that MSNBC calls itself "the best political team" on television, when in fact CNN makes that hubristic distinction.
• Falsely asserting that Charles Gibson has reported solely from New York, prompting a letter from ABC News Senior Vice President to Romenesko.
• Claiming that the Pulitzer Prize committee still sends telegrams to alert winners three months after Western Union stopped sending telegrams.
• Making the correction box twice in a single day for two different articles in 2006.
• Correction round-up of 2005, which includes referring to the then-most popular sitcom on television, Everybody Loves Raymond as as "All About Raymond."

Network executives could hardly argue that viewers don’t care about politics. Last week’s Democratic debate on MSNBC drew almost eight million viewers, and won higher ratings than any of the three network’s shows — including NBC’s ill-fated debut of its made-for-the-Internet series, “Quarterlife.” That debate was the highest-rated program in MSNBC’s history — before that, the cable news station’s highest rating was 3.7 million on March 19, 2002, the night the invasion of Iraq began.

Sigh. Well, already-error-prone Stanley suddenly had to file on deadline and everything last night, just like an honest-to-god newspaper reporter. Given her track record even without these constraints, it's a miracle her copy was not, somehow, even worse.