Correction of the Day

The Times can't find any instances where Lieberman said "stay the course" -- and then it does.

Published October 25, 2006 7:07PM (EDT)

In a story on Tuesday, the New York Times said that an "exhaustive" search of "more than 100" television and radio interviews, newspaper articles, speeches and debates hadn't turned up a single occasion on which Sen. Joe Lieberman used the words "stay the course" in talking about Iraq.

In a "corrective article" posted today, the Times says that Lieberman has indeed used the words "stay the course" several times in talking about Iraq -- and that at least five examples of his doing so were included in the same Times database reporters Jennifer Medina and Anne Kornblut said they checked for their original article.

Why didn't Medina and Kornblut catch the references the first time around? Well, you'd like to know, wouldn't you? The Times' explanation is that there isn't one. "It is unclear why, when the database was checked for the phrase before publication, three times, it did not come up," Medina writes in today's article. "A similar search on Tuesday, after readers complained, yielded the correct results."


By Tim Grieve

Tim Grieve is a senior writer and the author of Salon's War Room blog.

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2006 Elections Joe Lieberman The New York Times War Room