NY Times Takes a Long and Winding Road to Set the Record Straight

 No Joke: Jackie Mason Gets an Error-Filled Farewell

Perusing The New York Times print edition this morning (yes, it's still a thing) and was startled to find a sizable chunk of page A-16 was devoted to corrections of stories that appeared in recent days.

That's hardly notable, in and of itself. The Times routinely owns up to errors, unlike many other papers. But what was striking was how many of them were in this roundup.

Some are copy editing hiccups--filed under the category of stuff happens, like being off a year on someone's age or a careless misspelling. But several came from one article--the obit of comedian Jackie Mason, which had some eagle-eyed readers kvetching.

An obituary on Sunday and in some copies on Monday about the comedian Jackie Mason contained a number of errors. It referred incorrectly to the circumstances in which he was reported to have used a Yiddish word, considered to be a racial slur, in talking about David N. Dinkins, at the time a Black candidate for mayor of New York City. The comment came in 1989 during a luncheon with Newsweek reporters, not during a banquet at the Plaza hotel in Manhattan. The obituary misstated where Mr. Mason pursued rabbinical studies; he did so at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem of America, a yeshiva in Manhattan, not Yeshiva University, also in Manhattan. It overstated the number of times that Mr. Mason had appeared on the “The Ed Sullivan Show” before his contract with it was canceled after Mr. Mason made what Mr. Sullivan regarded as an obscene gesture onstage; he had appeared on the show about 20 times before then, not “dozens of times.” The obituary omitted two of Mr. Mason’s survivors: a sister, Gail Schulman, and a brother, Rabbi Gabriel Maza. And it was not the case that Mr. Mason’s two younger sisters had married rabbis.

Oy vez is mir. That's a lot to get wrong. And it's especially surprising, given the heft of the Times obit desk and its ample resources to fact check. Given the putative author, William Grimes, has long been gone from the paper, it's likely this one has been gathering digital moss for a while and the haste to crank it out allowed for these oopsies.

At least the Times set the record straight, given that Mr. Mason was unable to do so.