NYT Op-Ed Writer Perlstein Botches Reagan's Birth Month
In a May 26 New York Times op-ed piece entitled "America's Forgotten Liberal" (HT Jim Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web), Rick Perlstein opened by telling readers that "January was the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth."
Oops. Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6, 1911.
Here's a graphic capture of Perlstein's first two paragraphs:
Maybe the problem is that Perlstein was so excited when he found out that Reagan's 100th birth anniversary was coming up that he started celebrating a week or so early.
Paragraph 2 captured above accurately previews how the rest of the op-ed by the author of “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America” is pathetically weak "what if" dreck over which the further use of bandwidth is not warranted.
Perlstein's only other tagged appearance at NewsBusters came courtesy of Ken Shepherd, who documented the writer's opinion that "Obama Needs to Be as Stubborn as Reagan Was."
One thing for sure: Perlstein, and apparently the fact-checkers at the Times, are about as good with dates as Barack Obama.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
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Comments
People in Glass Houses
Submitted by wingnut55 on Fri, 05/27/2011 - 6:08pm.
Hey Tom, did you write that Ronald Wilson Reagan was born February 6, 2011. Oops, I think the birth year was 1911. People in Glass Houses should not throw stones.
Gosh, my layers of fact-checkers missed that ...
Submitted by Tom Blumer on Fri, 05/27/2011 - 6:26pm.
... until we got to your layer. Thx.
Which means that my house was made of glass for about 30 minutes. The NYT item has been up for almost 24 hours. I'm 5% as bad as them, and slowly declining. :-->
UPDATE, May 29: at least 60 hours later, Perlstein's item is uncorrected, making yours truly's typo less than 1% as bad as the NYT, which will apparently let Perlstein's error stand for all time.
Now, if you can just answer
Submitted by TheHistorian on Fri, 05/27/2011 - 6:35pm.
the question of "Who was Hubert Humphrey?" Was he a never-was as a "bucket of warm spit" for Lyndon Johnson? I was only 14 when LBJ was elected over Goldwater, but don't remember anything that Humphrey did that was memorable. Know he was a big lib is all.
However, EVERYONE knows what RWR did.
Dennis Prager
Layers?
Submitted by neighb on Fri, 05/27/2011 - 6:37pm.
"Layers of fact-checkers"?????
Layers????
Someone needs to consider replacing old, lazy employees.....
The obvious solution is to unionize.
Submitted by SickofLibs on Fri, 05/27/2011 - 6:40pm.
.
A two digit typo---
Submitted by matthewdean on Fri, 05/27/2011 - 6:29pm.
doesn't alter the fact that TB's article was right on.
Into each keyboard life a few typos are wont to fall.
Writer's of Mr. B's caliber suffer far fewer than average.
No charge, Mr. B. :o)
MD
Whew ...
Submitted by Tom Blumer on Fri, 05/27/2011 - 6:48pm.
... I was afraid that was going to be expensive. :-->
I frgt to prfred
Submitted by TheHistorian on Fri, 05/27/2011 - 6:28pm.
is his excuse. And he has the chance to recall his screw ups. Think he'll change it by editing it?
Dennis Prager