Tierney seemingly absolved from NY Times public editor's corrections crusade

Since September 2, New York Times public editor Byron E. Calame has strongly and publicly criticized Times columnist Paul Krugman for failing to adequately correct an error in his August 19 column. Calame has persisted in criticizing Krugman, claiming in a September 26 Times op-ed and in two entries on his Times Web journal that the lack of an adequate "formal correction" from Krugman shows that "the corrections policy of Gail Collins, editor of the Times' editorial page, is not being fully enforced." But, despite his professed intention to maintain accuracy on the Times' op-ed page, Calame has yet to criticize Times columnist John Tierney, whose twice-a-week columns have included several factual inaccuracies.

In his August 19 column, Krugman wrote of the 2000 presidential election: "Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore." One week later, Krugman issued a correction to this statement at the bottom of his August 26 column, in which Krugman acknowledged that Calame "rightly" noted that he had "initially misstate[ed] the results of the 2000 Florida election study by a media consortium led by The Miami Herald."

In a September 2 entry on his Web journal, Calame continued to press Krugman, claiming that the August 26 correction was inadequate because it "erred in describing the findings of the other news media consortium" that studied voting in Florida, a consortium "in which The Times was a participant." In his correction, Krugman said that the Times consortium analysis "showed Al Gore winning all statewide manual recounts," while Calame said that it determined Gore would have won in only five of the six recount scenarios. In fact, the study determined Gore would have prevailed in six of the seven statewide recount scenarios [Associated Press, 11/11/01]. Calame urged Krugman and Collins to issue a second formal correction in order to trigger a process that, unlike Krugman's August 26 correction, "appends it to the electronic versions of the article in NYTimes.com and in electronic databases." Calame followed up with a September 16 post, in which he alleged that Krugman was not being held to the Times editorial page's corrections standard. "As a result, readers of nytimes.com who simply search for 'Krugman' won't find any indication that there are uncorrected errors in the columns the query turns up," Calame wrote.

Lastly, in his September 26 column, Calame wrote:

Meanwhile, in the opinion section of The Times, the corrections policy of Gail Collins, the editor of the editorial page, is not being fully enforced. As I have written on my Web journal, Paul Krugman has not been required to correct, in the paper, recent acknowledged factual errors in his column about the 2000 election in Florida.

The Times has long been a trailblazer in its commitment to correcting errors. This is no time to let those standards slip -- even when well-known critics and columnists are involved.

After Times op-ed page editor David Shipley explained the editing and fact-checking processes for the paper's guest op-eds in a July 31 column, Media Matters for America noted that those same standards were apparently not being applied to the paper's regular columnists. Calame's pursuit of honest commentary from his paper's columnists has thus far focused solely on Krugman, ignoring the Times' conservative columnists and several factual inaccuracies that Media Matters has identified in their columns and that remain uncorrected. Tierney's columns offer some clear examples.

In his April 30 column, Tierney falsely claimed that Bush's proposal to address the solvency of Social Security by reducing benefits for upper- and middle-class workers would actually "improve benefits for the poor." Tierney offered no support for his claim, and, according to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities of the plan developed by Robert C. Pozen, upon which the Bush proposal is reportedly based, it would likely cut the level of benefits promised under the current Social Security system for all workers making more than $20,000 a year -- or just above the poverty threshold of $19,157 for a family of four, with two children -- while leaving benefit levels for those making under $20,000 unchanged.

In his June 14 column (one of many devoted to praising Chile's privatized retirement system), Tierney falsely claimed that "Chileans who control their own private-account pensions don't have to count on politicians or groups like AARP to decide when they can retire. It's a personal choice, not a public battle." The Chilean government, however, sets a minimum retirement age for the majority of workers participating in its pension system, just as the U.S. government does for Social Security.

In his August 7 column, Tierney claimed that "[i]n the 1930's, the Arctic was as warm as it is now." But according to the Arctic Council and the International Arctic Science Committee's October 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, average Arctic near-surface air temperatures today are approximately 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than in the 1930s.