5th
Escalation of hostilities by the New York Times
They’re this close to full-out, no-holds-barred war with me.
First, some copy editor screws up in captioning a picture of American students studying in Prague that accompanied an article about study abroad as a new “credential for global fluency.”
Sure, if you look at the caption now, you won’t see anything to arouse suspicion. That’s because the Times corrected the error in the original caption, which identified the country in question as “Czechoslovakia” — a country that hasn’t officially existed for almost fifteen years. Of course, I take full credit for the mistake’s correction, since I pointed out the error in a letter to the editor:
Laura Pappano (“The Foreign Legions,” Nov. 4) claims study abroad has become de rigeur for “globally fluent students” today. Pity that the credential is evidently not needed of New York Times copy editors.
A caption in an accompanying photo described American students “enrolled in a college just for them in Czechoslovakia,” a country the Times’ copy editor would do well to know has not formally existed since Jan. 1, 1993, the day its “Velvet Divorce” took effect and gave way to the successor Czech and Slovak republics.
Or maybe this is just a sign that “global fluency” isn’t really all that fluent. It’s routine for Americans to equate the Czech Republic with Czechoslovakia, or, as happened to President Bush, to mix up Slovakia and Slovenia. Americans may think the differences trifling. Czechs and Slovaks (and no doubt Slovenes), I assure you, have a less dismissive view of them.
Nice, helpful, with an appropriate level of snarkiness. Still, the Times didn’t publish my letter. Nor did they at least acknowledge their mistake, as of yet, on their corrections page. Not to mention they give no indication in the updated story that anything changed. Bastards.
Granted, I felt moderately vindicated when the error was finally corrected in the caption when I checked again this morning, a good two days after I brought it to their attention.
But then, when I returned to the Times’ home page, I saw a tease for an article mentioning Prague in 1967. Following the link, I saw it was a review of the New York premiere of Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
I read about the play some time ago, after it originally debuted on stage in London and made a brief run in Prague. It’s about a Czech student in England, who returns to his home country of Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact armies invade in August 1968, his love of rock music, and how Jan’s attachment to the underground psychedelic Czech rock band the Plastic People of the Universe winds up getting him in trouble in the 1970s (that could well be an illusion to former Czech dissident-cum-president Václav Havel, a friend of Stoppard). The play — as noted in descriptions from London’s Royal Court Theatre, Radio Prague, New York’s Jacobs Theater, the Associated Press or even Wikipedia — thus spans the years from the Soviet invasion in 1968 until the Velvet Revolution and demise of communism at the end of the 1980s.
Unless, of course, you believe the Times.
“A protégé of Max (Brian Cox), a growling lion of a professor at Cambridge,” writes Times theater critic Ben Brantley, “Jan leaves England for Prague when the city is occupied by Soviet tanks in 1967.”
Oops.
It’s a pity the critic couldn’t be arsed to, I don’t know, read the plot synopsis in the theater’s program, or check Wikipedia, or use any number of sources to get that seemingly trifling detail correct. And, because the reporter screwed up, the copy editor’s followed his lead, giving the review the equally erroneous headline: “Going to Prague in 1967, but Not Without His Vinyl.”
So, I took the liberty of sending the Times another letter:
Writers often taken certain liberties with history in crafting scripts for stage or screen, but the same license ought not to be granted to journalists. Thus, I suggest Ben Brantley (“Going to Prague in 1967, but Not Without His Vinyl, Nov. 5) pay closer attention to both history, and the script (or at least the official program) for his next review.
Brantley’s review of the New York premiere of Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll” describes how the play’s story begins with the protagonist, Jan, returning home to Prague “when the city is occupied by Soviet tanks in 1967.”
The problem is, Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. Tom Stoppard knows this. (His play sets the dramatic event in its historically accurate year of 1968.) The online programs for productions of “Rock ‘n’ Roll” in both London and New York record it correctly. Even Wikipedia gets the year right. But, sadly, Brantley, writing for the “newspaper of record,” can’t quite get this little fact straight.
Naturally, I don’t expect the Times to run it, or to acknowledge my due diligence in pointing out their mistakes. They should, though.
Back before I washed out of journalism school, I learned about the dreaded “Medill F.” Any story written for a class that contained a single factual error received an automatic failing grade from the instructor. It was a severe policy, one professors explained to students with a certain sinister glee, but it hammered home an important point: an article, a reporter, a newspaper are only as good as the accuracy of their information. Flub the facts and you lose some credibility.
Maybe these sorts of errors seem trifling to the Times. After all, who but a history Ph.D. student writing a dissertation on Czech-Slovak relations in the 1960s would even notice a little miscue like giving the wrong year for the Soviet invasion, or committing the all-too-common American faux pas of referring to “Czechoslovakia” in the present tense?
But facts are facts, and the Times has a particularly poor record of getting the facts right when it comes to the former Czechoslovakia these days. Not that they aren’t without ample company among major news organizations.
Still, the Times’ repeated failures to get details correct in cases where they might not matter much makes we wonder if they’re making similar or even worse mistakes in other cases, cases where I might not have the expertise to spot errors, cases where the mistakes in question have a much greater impact on how readers understand events and the world.
In other words, botching a year here and a name there has me questioning the Times’ credibility that much more than usual, which is often the first step down a slippery slope.
