Come For The Lies, Stay For The Verbs

What will become of the online New York Times? Nobody cares. Still, debate continues at the Times between providing free online access to the articles, or beginning a monthly subscription charge. In the process, we get some real insight into the end of Old Media.

The Times is typically missing the point. The paper's readership isn't declining because its potential audience is online. Its readership is declining because online access makes the Times useless, while also demonstrating that the Times is more obviously flawed than ever before.

Why would someone read Adam Nagourney's misleading interpretations of election polls when they can just access the raw data? In that same spirit, an online transcript of a White House event provides more news and less deception than any Times article. Plus, you don't have to wait three weeks for the inevitable funny correction.

Consider the paper's recent embarrassment, with the Times attempting to run a discreet correction on an article entitled "The Meek Shall Inherit the Bill." The entire basis of Edmund Andrews' piece-which was actually an attack on Bush administration policies-was based on a statistic that the reporter got wrong. As the Times noted, Andrews "misstated a projection by the Congressional Budget Office about Social Security benefits. Under current law, a median-income worker who retires today can expect an annual benefit of $14,900, not $26,000."

You can go online at the CBO website to see how Andrews screwed up the figures. More importantly, you can go to the CBO site and educate yourself. Too bad that Times columnist Paul Krugman didn't do the same before making some peculiar assumptions about U.S. mutual fund estimates in his Jan. 21 column.

In that same spirit, Timesman Nicholas Kristof embarrassed himself with an absurd piece trying to suggest that China had a superior infant mortality rate to the U.S. He was caught using Beijing's low rate of 5.05 per thousand to cover for the nation's considerably higher rate of over 25 deaths per thousand. The claim was easily destroyed by some simple fact checking at the Centers for Disease Control.

The Times can charge for bad reporting, or they can give it away. There are certainly enough bloggers willing to work for free in exposing the paper's multiple mistakes. Ideally, ordinary folks who simply want facts will eventually skip the bloggers, too. They'll continue to seek out the purest source while sparing themselves agenda-driven errors.

To be fair to the bloggers, though, the majority of such errors currently remain the realm of the Times editorial staff. Maybe we'll all even profit from that. It won't be long before the Times has to pay people to read the thing.