Corrections, policies and trust

Step forward, anyone* who hasn't made that million/billion swap at some point, even if you caught yourself right before going off the road, and even if you saw all the zeroes in your head as you were writing. We all make mistakes, and we all make them in stuff we know like the back of our hands. That's why we read over what we've written and employ editors and do other things to fend off the consequences of the human condition, because one of those consequences is that we all screw up.

You can see the Times's stylistic reasoning emerging in the first and fourth corrections. In the first, OK -- the thought of the writer banging their head on the nearest desk at the thought of having screwed up the million/billion thing probably means punishment enough, so no explanation of how the error came about. In the fourth, sure. Somebody subtracted the birth year from the current year and forgot to ask when the birthday was, or grabbed an outdated bio sheet, or something; there's nothing wrong with making clear that this bit of carelessness belongs with people the paper trusted, not the paper itself.

The other two ought to be a little more troubling:

An article on Monday about President Trump’s continuing conflicts with Congress misstated Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s schedule during the weekend. Her staff said she was in Washington; she had not, as the article stated, left town.

As in the fourth correction, this one suggests that the writer(s) took someone's word for something and didn't do the requisite checking. Is there some reason we're not told who provided the wrong information about the speaker's whereabouts? Because that seems to go to the question of why some people's word is too good for the Times to check, and I'd like to know some of the social/political correlates of that decision.

I can't track down from here the original offense described in the third correction, but it does seem to raise a similar question. The story is about the president's live phone call to a Fox host on Saturday night, in which red herring was one of many dishes on offer. Again: Who took what at face value without checking, and who's getting the benefit of the information subsidy here? Or is this just a case of a writer putting 2 and 2 together and getting 22?

I don't mean to suggest that these "prove" a bias. (I have a methods class to teach tonight, and at some point over the semester, I'll end up quoting a cherished methodology mentor: If you want proof, go to seminary. We're in the probability business.) An appropriate sample of Times corrections might even show that directional partisan trust is normally distributed over a year's worth of blunders.** But if the Times wants to keep suspicious from starting, it could stand to look at its conventional wisdom on when a correction decides to distribute blame. Newsroom politics aren't the only ones at stake.

* OK, "anyone who's written for publication in a hurry more than, like, five or six times." Sheez.
** Which is not the same as a year's worth of stories, but we'll get into that later.