In a late February column, I explained that the New York Times had for more than two years failed to correct the web versions of three 1994 articles and an editorial that falsely claimed Tyson Foods had benefited from $9 million in state loans while Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas:

To this very day -- nearly two and a half years later -- those articles are still available on the Times site. They still contain the false claim about the $9 million in loans. And the necessary correction still is not appended. See for yourself here, here, here, and here. Even after the Times admitted it had failed to append the correction to the articles, it still didn't append the correction!

The whole story is here, for those interested in the details.

At some point in the past few weeks, the Times finally got around to appending a correction to the bottom of the three articles, which you can read in its entirety if you click the “here, here, here, and here” links above. Note, however, that the editorial still does not have a correction appended.

Note also that the Times' correction reads in part: “Although the company did benefit from at least $7 million in state tax credits, it did not receive $9 million in loans from the state.” This, as Joe Conason and Gene Lyons explained in their invaluable book The Hunting Of The President, is still quite misleading, as it does not make clear that the tax credits Tyson got were simply “investment incentives available to every corporation” rather than a sweetheart deal, as the articles imply.

But after two and a half years of prodding -- and 16 years after the initial erroneous reports -- I'll take what I can get. Now, about that editorial ...