Errors and Omissions

Standing-room airplane seats - the drama continues

Byron Calame, the Times' ombudsman, publishes in today's paper an autopsy of how the standing room airplane seat story could have found its way to page 1 with a major error at its core.

This blog referred to the article and Airbus' retractions in this post and some others that same day. Reading Calame's report, Airbus had a lot to complain about. Even the May 2 correction the Times published did not illuminate what the post-mortem did--that there was no evidence the standing room seat idea had been discussed with anyone for two years--a far cry from the article's assertion that "Airbus has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian carriers, though none have agreed to it yet."

An editor's note on May 4 continued the backtracking, but only today's analysis exposed the story for what it was: a banal business-section story on airplane-seat design leveraging a sexy piece of data and some speculation to transform itself into a Page 1 story, with lots of guilty hands touching it along the way.

newspapers, media, errors, New York Times

posted by Unknown @ 5/21/2006 02:51:00 PM