Layers and layers of editors and fact checkers

Journalism's Patron Saint is Walter Cronkite, even if it's not true that LBJ said that "if we've lost Cronkite, we've lost America."  It's all hagiography, which is the point.

The New York Times is the pinnacle of Journalism's (over inflated) view of itself.  All the News that's fit to print, and all that.  Hagiography, don't you know.

So this must be the most embarrassing correction ever printed by The Times, concerning a story reminiscing on Cronkite's long and storied career:

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

And so how does a journalist with a long history of this sort of mistake, get green lighted by The Times to do an article this, err, hagiographical?  Kathy Shaidle has a theory (minorly NSFW).

Via the Captain.