> The parent comment to the subject of my response established the scope of this discussion as including legacy media in general, one comment invoked the NYT, and I can bring up another publication as well.
I suppose you can, but your comment needed a better transition to make it clear what you were doing. The original comment brought CNN's coverage of a topic (in an unverifiable way) to make a general claim that "mainstream media lies, constantly and blatantly." Someone responded that the NYT article is a counterexample to that claim, and you quoted that link but started randomly talking about a Washington Post headline without even mentioning the publication's name, which made it seem like you were talking about the NYT's headline.
> In this example the WP reported it in the least effective way possible - as an edit to an existing article that most people would never revisit.
What else would you have them do? I see this kind of criticism often, but when I actually think about what would satisfy the critic vs. the other users of the product, it seems like a situation where one users wants the product tailored to their unusual wants in a way that would degrade user experience for the bulk of other users or would require an investment that would be hard to justify, e.g.:
1. Headlining errata on the front page: that would be annoying and take space away from what 99.999% of users are actually looking for (today's news as of now).
2. Featuring errata prominently in the actual article: again, it's annoying because 99.999% of users want to read today's news as of now, not errata.
3. Article version control accessible to the users: relatively expensive, and 99.999% of users don't care and would never use it. Even if they have some internal version, my guess there's all kinds of unpublishable or unpolished stuff in the history that they're now going to have to edit for publication.
4. Issuing corrected articles, keeping the erroneous ones online: now you have different links flying around for more-or-less the same stuff, but the most popular ones are likely the early ones with errors. Even if you put a link to the correction, most people want to read the best version, and the links aren't taking them there.
5. Etc.
> I bring this up to support the argument in the parent comment to the one I responded to, this example betrays a blatant and willful intent to misrepresent the facts on the part of at least this one member of the mainstream media.
That's obviously false, since the claim is incoherent when applied to your example. If it were true, why would they have bothered to correct the headline? If they had a "blatant and willful intent to misrepresent the facts" wouldn't they have kept the initial headline because it "misrepresented the facts"? In reality, the corrected the headline, which is evidence that they don't indent to "misrepresent the facts."