One correction down - one to go

Thomas Friedman, in a recent op-ed titled Daring to Fail writes, "I’ve always thought that the most important rule of journalism is: Never try to be smarter than the story."
 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/opinion/friedman-daring-to-fail.html

In my last post, I published an excerpt from a Free Beacon article.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is facing criticism from the pro-Israel community following an article in Wednesday’s paper that incorrectly asserts Israeli settlers assassinated former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

While discussing renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Friedman wrote, “One should never forget just how crazy some of Israel’s Jewish settlers are. They assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin when he tried to cede part of the West Bank for peace.”

However, Israeli settlers were not responsible for Rabin’s assassination. The New York Times made the same error in a 2005 article and was forced to run a correction.

Rabin’s assassin Yigal Amir was living in the city of Herzliya, which is not a settlement, when he carried out the murder.

The Free Beacon article has since been updated to include another error by Mr. Friedman regarding singer Eric Burdon who did not cancel a show in Israel.

A correction about Burdon’s performance appeared on the Times’ website shortly after a Free Beacon reporter reached out to Friedman and Times’ spokeswoman Eileen Murphy.
“Mr. Burdon ultimately decided to perform, despite pressure not to,” the correction said in a parenthetical notation.
“There is a correction on the story,” Murphy told the Free Beacon when asked about Friedman’s reference to Burdon.
When asked about Amir, Murphy said that she had informed the paper’s editors of the complaint.
“If a correction is deemed appropriate, one will be issued,” she wrote in an email.
http://freebeacon.com/hot-flat-and-crowded-with-errors/

Mondoweiss asks a question about the New York Times' correction.

An earlier version of this column incorrectly attributed to the British newspaper The Independent a sentence about a singer, Eric Burdon. The sentence — “Burdon was just the latest of a rising number of artists and intellectuals who have started boycotting Israel over the occupation issue” — was by Mr. Friedman. (Mr. Burdon ultimately decided to perform, despite pressure not to.)

Shouldn’t the Times have directly stated that in addition to the misplaced quotation marks, Friedman erred in writing that Burdon supported the boycott instead of only placing the fact of the rocker’s appearance in Israel in parentheses?
http://mondoweiss.net/2013/08/thomas-friedman-incorrectly-credits-eric-burdon-with-joining-cultural-boycott-of-israel-while-extolling-kerrys-folly.html

Reading the article at the Mondoweiss website was quite surprising to me and left me with the belief expressed in the third song performed by the singers in the video below at the 2'34 mark. Hint- look at the title of this blog.