The Alessandra Stanley story is important because it's not about Alessandra Stanley

For quite a few years now, the blogerati have enjoyed writing about NYT tv writer Alessandra Stanley, who makes a shit ton of factual errors. Her correction rate went down somewhat in recent years (she was assigned a special editor) but now it's gone back up, and her error-filled story on Walter Cronkite has made the issue big again (see the public editor's mediocre column from Sunday).

Jaimes Rainey in the LAT and Craig Silverman in CJR have captured the point of this situation well. Writes Silverman:

The Times can let her twist in the wind with errors like these, or realize this situation is hurting the organization and come up with a training program that helps her stop making simple factual errors at such an alarming rate.

There’s a problem here, and it’s as much about the organization as it is about Alessandra Stanley.

Exactly. It's good times to make fun of Stanley, but the story here is about the paper, not about the writer. In the fallout from Jayson Blair, NYT bosses said repeatedly that they were going to be more careful (to a much lesser extent, some NYT folks also have said these kinds of things in the wake of the paper's fall-2002 hyping of Iraq's nuclear weapons threat -- a far more serious issue than Blair -- but others have their heals dug in on that one, to this day). They were going to try to get it right, to ask more questions, to look out for reporters with recurring problems.

And so every day that Alessandra Stanley continues to write for the Times, it's another FU to the readers. It says, loud and clear, that actually they're not going to take some of the basic steps that they could to make the paper more accurate.