Oft-Corrected 'NYT' Critic Cleans Up Her Act

Alessandra Stanley may not be the most influential TV writer in the country, and she may not be the most error-prone, but she's almost certainly the most influential error-prone TV writer, and vice versa.

Or was. For yesterday marked the New York Times critic's 103rd consecutive day without a story that required a correction -- her longest such run since June 12, 2002, when she broke a 147-day mistake-free streak. (This is based on a Nexis search for her byline.)

"I had not kept as close a count as you, but obviously I am trying to avoid them," Stanley said, via email, when I asked her whether she was doing anything different.

It's about time. All too often in the past, Stanley's penchant for introducing riotously careless goofs into the Newspaper of Record -- referring to Everybody Loves Raymond as All About Raymond, for instance, or confusing CNN and MSNBC -- has distracted from her unfailingly stylish and perceptive analysis. (To be sure, many of her mistakes are of the sort that should be caught by the copy desk.) Most notoriously, one of her screw-ups almost got the Times sued after she claimed, in defiance of video evidence, that Geraldo Rivera "nudged an Air Force rescue worker out of the way so his camera crew could tape him as he helped lift an older woman in a wheelchair to safety."

Finally, after one of the most bone-headed blunders of all -- saying the Iraq War started in 2002 -- Gawker called for her head, accusing her of having "all the credibility of a Wikipedia entry." Nine days later, her current stretch of full accuracy commenced.

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."

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P.S. Yes, I am fully aware that writing about another journalist's errors is bad karma. I certainly haven't gone 103 days without a correction -- or, as we bloggers like to sneakily call them, an "update" -- in quite a while.

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Update, 6.27.08: As commenter Widmerpool points out, as of this morning, Stanley's June 19 article now carries a correction, reducing her perfect streak to 97 days -- still her longest since Jan. 2, 2007.

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