The New York Times, whose billionaire owner Carlos Slim is unwilling fully to fund the paper's newsgathering operations, has lately resorted to turning over space on its front page and news columns to outside non-profit organizations.
The problem with this approach is that, in some cases, the non-profit news organization's standards are even worse than those of the Times itself.
Such is the case with a front-page article about a doctoral program candidate whose application was rejected by Harvard. The candidate had spent more than 20 years "in an Indiana prison for the murder of her 4-year-old-son."
The article, supplied to the Times by the Marshall Project, slowed me down to begin with by including a reference to "a prison library that hewed toward romance novels." My authoritative Webster's Second Unabridged defines "hew" as "to cut or chop with an ax or similar instrument." There doesn't appear to be any pressing reason for this unorthodox usage. It would have been better to changed "hewed" to "tended," or to rewrite it to "a prison library dominated by romance novels."
Then the article refers to "staff members of both Harvard's history and American studies departments." In fact Harvard does not have an American studies "department." It has a program, but the program draws on faculty from other departments, such as English, History, and African and African American Studies.
This subtle but substantively serious error is repeated throughout the Times/Marshall Project article. There's a reference to "John Stauffer, one of the two American studies professors." Stauffer is actually "Professor of English and of African and African American Studies." He's not an "American studies professor." The Times article goes on to say, "Professor Stauffer emphasized in interviews that he and his departmental colleague, Dan Carpenter, were simply trying to ensure that Harvard did its due diligence about the candidacy." In fact Stauffer and Carpenter are not "departmental colleagues," despite the Times' inaccurate claim that they are. Stauffer is in the English and African and African American Studies departments. Carpenter is in the department of Government.
This is one of those errors that would have easily been discovered had the reporter showed the article pre-publication to the people he was writing about. Most news organizations discourage that practice.