On occasion when we’re reading the morning newspapers, we wistfully think about how nice it would be if Jean-Francois Champollion, the so-called father of Egyptology, sat in the cubicle next to ours. After all, if Champollion was able to crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics, maybe he’d be able to make some sense of the impenetrable code that comes to us so often over our cornflakes.
Such was the case yesterday, as we puzzled over a lollapalooza of an Editor’s Note from the New York Times — a note which upon first, and second, and third reading, made no more sense to us than the etchings on Queen Hatshepsut’s throne.
The note in question was, in fact, an attempt to correct a previous correction, which had appeared in the Times Tuesday. Both corrections in turn referred back to an April 25th front-page article by freelancer Christopher Elliott.
In the original story, the author explored how rising costs were forcing airlines to consider more creative ways of packing passengers into coach class. According to Elliott, one airline manufacturer, Airbus, was actively pitching the idea of adding a section of vertical, standing-room only “seats” to carriers in Asia.
The idea of hordes of airline passengers strapped upright on intercontinental flights was ludicrous on the face of it – which may be what tempted Times editors to slap it onto page one, complete with illustration, in the first place. As it turns out, it was a little too ludicrous.
Afterwards, representatives of Airbus said that, while the vertical-seat proposal had been kicked around internally three years ago, ultimately sanity had prevailed. More important, according to Airbus, the idea had never actually been pitched to any airlines.
All of which eventually prompted the Times to issue its belated first correction:
A front-page article last Tuesday about seating options that airlines are considering to accommodate more passengers in economy class referred incorrectly to the concept of carrying passengers standing up with harnesses holding them in position. During preparation of the article, The Times’s questions to one aircraft manufacturer, Airbus, were imprecise. The company now says that while it researched that idea in 2003, it has since abandoned it. The article also misstated the capacity of the Airbus A380 superjumbo jet. The airliner can accommodate 853 passengers in regular seats; standing-room positions would not be needed.
Confused? Yup, so were we. And so were some folks on the Times masthead. After the first correction, Times Assistant Managing Editor Craig Whitney told the New York Observer that Allan Siegal, the Times‘s standards czar, thought that the situation might warrant a more detailed editor’s note. Sound conclusion.
So yesterday the Times issued that Editor’s Note — essentially a second correction, much of which duplicated the first correction word for word. This time, however, the Times elaborated that, in speaking to Airbus, the reporter “did not make it clear that [he] was interested in standing-room ‘seats.’ As a result,” added the Times, “the article said the company would not specifically comment on the upright-seating proposal.”
Huh?
How could the company decline to comment on a proposal that Elliott apparently never asked them to comment on?
But the confusion was just beginning. Next, the Times tacked on this odd bit of hieroglyphics:
A correction of the article appeared on this page on Tuesday. It should have acknowledged that if The Times had correctly understood the history of the proposal, the article would have qualified it, and would not have appeared on Page A1.
Should have … would have … qualified what?
Isn’t that what the first correction did? That is, explain how the article got entirely wrong–or, in Times legalese, “failed to qualify”– the history and context of the vertical “seat” idea?
And why specify Page A1? Does that mean that if the reporter had gotten his facts straight, this ostensible non-story would have appeared somewhere else in the paper like, say, the front page of the business section? If in fact, there was no story to tell here – as appears to be the case – why not ban any attempt to make something from nothing from the entire paper, and not just from page one?
In short, after reading the Editor’s Note elaborating on the correction, we’re thinking the situation might warrant an even more detailed Editor’s Note.
That would be one that might explain how a reporter reached conclusions based on nothing any source had told him. Or how this particular howler managed to wind its way through the gauntlet of Times‘ editors that must bless any offering for page one? Or — perhaps most baffling — why so many Times corrections and Editor’s Notes are written in a prose so stilted, so arcane, so constipated, that one longs for a Jean-Francois Champollion to perform the translation.
Felix Gillette writes about the media for The New York Observer.