NY Times omits correction from flawed Kornblut article on Clinton speech

Written by Josh Kalven

Published

The New York Times appears to have omitted a correction from a July 16 article it archived, in which the paper wrote in an “Editor's Note” that reporter Anne Kornblut falsely reported that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton had recently criticized her Democratic colleagues in Congress for “wasting time” and “for taking on issues that arouse conservatives and turn out Republican voters.” Clinton had in fact been criticizing the Republican-led Congress in the speech, not her fellow Democrats.

The New York Times appears to have omitted a correction from a July 16 article it archived, in which the paper acknowledged in an “Editor's Note” that reporter Anne Kornblut falsely reported that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) had recently criticized her Democratic colleagues in Congress for “wasting time” and “for taking on issues that arouse conservatives and turn out Republican voters.” While ABC News' The Note weblog flagged the apparent omission in the TimesSelect version of the article, Media Matters for America noted last week that no correction was included in the version available in the Nexis news database.

The New York Times correction can be found only if readers view the July 16 article through its original link.

In the article -- headlined “Clinton, in Arkansas, Says Democrats Are 'Wasting Time' ” -- Kornblut falsely reported that Clinton, during a July 15 trip to Arkansas, criticized her Democratic colleagues in Congress “for taking on issues that arouse conservatives and turn out Republican voters rather than finding consensus on mainstream subjects.” Soon after the Times posted the article to its website, blogger Duncan Black (also a Media Matters senior fellow) pointed out that Clinton had in fact been criticizing the Republican-led Congress in the speech, not her fellow Democrats. The following day, Media Matters posted an audio clip of the speech, further confirming that Kornblut had mischaracterized Clinton's remarks. On the evening of July 18, the Times finally ran a correction of the article and posted an “Editor's Note” alongside the article explaining the error.

But while the “Editor's Note” is still posted alongside the original web-only version of the article, it appears that the Times omitted it from the archived version of the article, and the Nexis version still does not contain the correction. Therefore, future readers will be entirely unaware that the article's central premise was “based on a misinterpretation of a passage” in Clinton's speech, in the Times' words.

We have also found no evidence of any correction from those news outlets that hyped the article in the days following its publication -- including The Frontrunner, and conservative outlets such as NewsMax, National Review Online's weblog, and The Drudge Report.