Diminishment

The young Friar, who had his eyes on a journalism career, sometimes had a hazy picture of himself working for The New York Times. It was the apex of all of the newspaper monuments, the closest our nation had to a "paper of record" in the same sense that a county seat daily is for that county's publication of legal information. 

It was never fully formed and as time wore on, it morphed into the idea of a byline at The Chicago Tribune or someplace that wasn't New York City -- a place that, during those years, was very much a Dinkinsian area to be avoided. A deepening interest in working with young people at his church made it morph into a complete career change that brought him to a pulpit instead.

But still, early illusions fade the hardest, and the idea of that solid thump of paper landing on someone's doorstep while bearing within it my own words under my own name hangs around, lifting its head at odd intervals. Which is one of the reasons this story -- here linked from Quillette, but available in other places as well -- is such a bummer. We can discuss the virtues and vices of the Times' "1619 Project" at length, of course. An ambitious attempt to examine unexamined aspects of the role of race-based slavery on the United States in the time leading up to and after its founding, the Project has been called to account by historians across the political spectrum. Even some sympathetic to its goals seem to think its reach exceeded its grasp.

But that's all a part of give and take discussion, something people used to do back in the dim prehistory of the Eightyzoic Era and earlier. In Philip Magness's story, he uses screen shots to demonstrate how one of the most contentious claims of the Project -- that the arrival of African slaves to the New World in 1619 represents the true American founding, rather than 1776's the Declaration of Independence -- has been quietly disappeared.

Whatever truths the Project's different authors may have grasped, that contention was clearly without merit and so described by most of its detractors and some of its supporters. For the Times or Project coordinator Nikole Hannah-Jones to fess up to this error and print a correction wouldn't really affect whatever parts of it prove true. Instead, Hannah-Jones denies that she meant that claim and statements to the contrary simply disappeared without notice.

One of the major responsibilities of a news organization is to be accurate. When it's not, the way that the trust of the reading public is maintained is by swift and clear acknowledgement of the error and reporting what actually turned out to be accurate. Corrections on the sly, especially in a medium as malleable as pixels on a screen, are evidence of a news outlet's lack of trustworthiness. And so the fond old illusion of my byline under that masthead takes another jolt to the head, because it seems that masthead has lost much of its luster.