Errors and Omissions

Snap judgment rendered in column

From a correction in today's WSJ:

IN 1968, the U.S. Senate was composed of 57 Democrats and 43 Republicans. A Deja Vu column May 1 incorrectly stated that the Senate then was "Republican dominated."

Here's the passage where that appeared, in an article about the grape-pickers' protests of the 1960's:

The federal government was divided on the boycott: Grapes were sold in the dining room of the Republican-dominated Senate but banished from the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. During the 1968 presidential campaign, Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy endorsed the boycott; Richard Nixon called it "clearly illegal." After he was elected, Mr. Nixon said he would eat California grapes "whenever I can." The Department of Defense, meanwhile, increased its grape purchases by more than 40% in 1969, shipping 2.5 million pounds to troops in Vietnam.

The paragraph had a poetic symmetry about it: the Democrats supported the boycott, the Republicans opposed it. The fact that the Democrats "dominated" the Senate would have been inconvenient to point out here. The truth was more complicated, of course. The Senate was far more conservative than the House in the '60's, even on the Democratic side (of which Southern Democrats were a large component).

This type of knee-jerk assessment would be excusable in the first draft of a column, but not after revision and fact-checking.

Wall Street Journal, errors, bias

posted by Unknown @ 5/05/2006 09:52:00 AM