The Alessandra Watch: How Wrong Is She?
That little bout of "truthiness" bitchiness this morning reminded us that it'd be a good time to look back at Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley's correctability in 2005. Our good pal Nexis tells us that Stanley notched 20 corrections on 137 articles this year, which means that a full 15 percent of her dispatches required correcting.*
But then we wondered if perhaps we were being unfair. (After all, why must we always be so glass-half-full? Congratulations, Alessandra, on being right a whopping 85 percent of the time this year!) Is Stanley really so much worse than any other critic?
The answer: Yes! She is! We checked 2005 corrections rates on 19 Times cultural critics, and we discovered that Stanley can comfortably claim the title as Most Inaccurate 2005. Indeed, she's more than twice as inaccurate as the average non-Stanley critic at the Times. (The other 18 averaged a 7 percent correction rate.)
Also, Alessandra's corrections are such fun. Like when the nation's leading newspaper was forced to print:
A television review yesterday about "How I Met Your Mother" and "Out of Practice," on CBS, misstated the name of the popular show, ended last season, that the network is trying to replace with another hit. It is "Everybody Loves Raymond," not "All About Raymond."
Because, hey, it was only one of the most popular sitcoms in the country, for what, five or six years?
After the jump, all the critics' standings. (Mazel tov, by the way, to error-free Michiko Kakutani and Frank Bruni.) And we'll be back tomorrow with Alessandra's greatest hits from this year.
* We employed the Cook Formula for calculating correction rates, which is ((byline(TK) and date is 2005)/(byline(TK) and "correction appended" and date is 2005)) x 100.
Alessandra Stanley, TV critic: 137 citations, 20 corrections, 15%
Anna Kisselgoff, dance critic: 22 citations, 3 corrections, 14%
Caryn James, film critic: 33 citations, 4 corrections, 12%
Michael Kimmelman, art critic: 53 citations, 6 corrections, 11%
Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic: 41 citations, 4 corrections, 10%
Ben Ratliff, jazz critic: 173 citations, 15 corrections, 9%
William Grimes, book critic: 84 citations, 7 corrections, 8%
Charles Isherwood, theater critic, 138 citations, 11 corrections, 8%
Virginia Heffernan, TV critic: 130 citations, 10 corrections, 8%
Manohla Dargis, film critic: 181 citations, 12 corrections, 7%
Ben Brantley, theater critic: 99 citations, 6 corrections, 6%
Janet Maslin, book critic: 105 citations, 6 corrections, 6%
Jon Pareles, pop music critic: 193 citations, 11 corrections, 6%
Kelefa Sanneh, pop music critic: 196 citations, 11 corrections, 6%
Anthony Tommasini, classical music critic: 184 citations, 10 corrections, 5%
Stephen Holden, film critic: 264 citations, 13 corrections, 5%
A.O. Scott, film critic: 120 citations, 4 corrections, 3%
Michiko Kakutani, book critic: 67 citations, 0 corrections, 0%
Frank Bruni, restaurant critic: 110 citations, 0 corrections, 0%