A couple of years ago, I tried to correct a false statement in the New York Times. Sisyphean task, I know. But this wasn’t one of those big, ideological falsehoods: it was a technical misrepresentation of a sentencing law. Which led to a big, ideological falsehood, but at least the task at hand was manageable: replace the misrepresentation of the law with an accurate description.
An embarrassed editor contacted me: the mistake was a fairly big miss on their part, and it completely undermined the point of the op-ed. But, he told me, they did not permit corrections of authors and content in the letters page. Would I write a different letter that offered the correct version of the law as additional information for interested readers, rather than calling it a correction? ...
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