Error-prone Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley made a mistake everyone!

Times tv critic Alessandra Stanley gets a lot of shit around here for making mistakes. It's not just that she makes a lot of them (though she does, or did), it's that she makes obvious, egregious ones that seem to suggest that she doesn't actually watch tv. But she's gotten better about it! She says. She told Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici that she's "trying to avoid" corrections, which is apparently a change of pace for her. How's she doing? Pretty well! She hasn't had a correction since she got the date of the Iraq war wrong 103 days ago. Her longest streak since 2002! BUT!

The Times' Alessandra Stanley weighs in on the frightening phenomenon: "'Gossip Girl' goes further than most shows in depicting the excesses of the rich and under-age (in this fantasy teenagers are never carded), but most of all it represents the next evolutionary stage of girl power television after 'Sex and the City.' That pioneering HBO series, and the movie version that comes out later this month, celebrates girlish women who joined forces - 'Us against the world'- in the pursuit of success and happiness."

If you were wondering why everyone running for president was talking like a wrestler yesterday instead of retaining some semblance of dignity, you'll be happy to find out the candidates were merely practicing for a new presidential tradition begun by George W. Bush: Appearing on a TV game show and cracking jokes. That might sound a little cheesy, but it was for a good cause. The president, you see, wanted to honor an Iraq veteran with the sort of dignity only host Howie Mandel can conjure on Deal Or No Deal. "Are you ready to get some acknowledgement for your hard work and bravery?" Mandel asked. Oh, sure, what the hell:

An anonymous journo writes, regarding our all-in-fun poll:

The tabloids are sick of the pantyless-Britney Spears-faux-British-accent-high-on-unknown-substances-bad-mother yarn. Easter just passed and resurrections are hot right now. OK!, People and Us Weekly have all given her cameo on How I Met Your Mother raves. And to be fair, they probably know more about TV than accident-prone New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley, who described Ms. Spears' performance as "a relief." [Jossip]

"The very fact that she could recite her lines was a relief: the most lasting television image of Ms. Spears in recent months showed her tied down to a stretcher. But the most promising comeback platforms for the tarnished or forgotten are network reality competitions like ABC's Dancing With the Stars. That series (and its many imitations) gives full vent to the highs and lows of show business; each dance number is a balletic metaphor for disgrace, punishing exertion and forgiveness." [Times, Video]

A reader asks, of the oft-incorrect Times TV critic, "how many more mistakes can Alessandra Stanley make before she loses her job?" But as Freud said, or was paraphrased as saying, there are no mistakes. We ask you, why does she fuck up so often, and so obviously? What can possibly make a person decide to remember Everybody Loves Raymond as "All About Raymond"? Her corrections are cries for help. Let's open it up to the floor: what's wrong with Alessandra Stanley?

At this point, New York Times star television critic Alessandra Stanley has all the credibility of a Wikipedia entry. Most of the information is probably right, but you shouldn't take anything as gospel because you never know what's real and what's just been invented by a bored 13 year-old in Iowa. Alessandra Stanley Correction Watch has gone from an evergreen subject to an old joke. Geraldo had to threaten to sue the Times to get them to correct something Stanley invented out of thin air. As a service to the human resources department at the New York Times, after the jump, we present the best (worst?) Alessandra Stanley mistakes since the last time we rounded them all up.

Professionally inaccurate Times TV critic Alessandra Stanely may have topped herself this morning, when she added a year to the war in Iraq. Stanley, you see, wanted to tell everyone about how the big broadcast networks have dumbed down their programming, to the point where they ignored the Tuesday presidential primaries in Texas and instead showed cheesy reality shows like "The Biggest Loser" and "Big Brother." This was stupid, Stanley said, because election news can get big ratings, as evidenced by last week's Democratic debate, which managed to attract a bigger audience that America's invasion of Iraq, six years ago:

Wealth, status, and power exploiting reality series Real Housewives of New York City premieres tonight on Bravo. What can we expect? Judging from the reviews, essentially the same thing as the Orange County iteration (except, you know, colder.) The Boston Globe's Matthew Gilbert is exclaimy and gay about it. The Los Angeles Times, in a spot-on, funny review, writes "Robespierre could not have come up with better revolutionary propaganda — all that's missing is the fake cottage, the shepherdess outfit and the guillotine. Feel free to envy them because they have so much; feel free to hate them because they are so hateful; feel free to laugh at them because they are so ridiculous." Brilliant! New York Times village idiot Alessandra Stanley has a far more obtuse take (where you at, Ginny?), but essentially comes to the same conclusion as everyone else: these creatures are tacky and nouveau, and actual New York "society" wouldn't even dare employ them, let alone welcome them as their own. We'll have a full write-up of the premiere tomorrow. I can't tell you how excited some of "us" are. After the jump, a dignified video of Extra going shopping with housewife Jill.

When angry British drunk Christopher Hitchens wrote his seminal "Why Women Aren't Funny" article in Vanity Fair last year, lots of people got upset. Mostly girls. Milking the manufactured outrage like the publishing geniuses they are, the magazine has finally had a woman take a full shot at refuting the thesis [VF]. Unfortunately, they picked Alessandra Stanley, who proves (not for the first time) that she has not one single drop of humor diluting the estrogen and errors that flow through her veins. So on the second day of the cooing and hubbub over the new Girl Power piece (it took us an extra day just to get through it, ha), it's worth pointing out the unspoken truth in all this catfighting: women will never be as funny as men to men. And men run everything.

Ridiculously error-prone New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley has been making reliably glaring mistakes in every single piece she has published in the newspaper of record for years now. Here's today's, in her story about how MSNBC is trying very hard not to upset the Clintons anymore: "MSNBC calls its stars 'the best political team' on television, but at the moment some players are in disgrace." A free cookie to Slate's Jack Shafer, who wrote an entire column about how annoying it is that CNN uses that "best political team" slogan incessantly. Does Ms. Stanley own a TV? Or have an editor? [NYT]

The TV critic for the Times, Stanley lives the American dream: She gets paid to watch the tube. Unfortunately, she's also saddled with a reputation for being notoriously inaccurate.

The Times let embittered and oft-inaccurate tv critic Alessandra Stanley write about something a little more weighty than Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles in today's paper. She gets to review the President's "State of the Union" speech, which happens on TV, yes, but it doesn't involve explosions and there are not really commercial breaks. Thankfully it's often transcribed and distributed beforehand, so Stanley doesn't have to sort of half-remember bits of dialog she wasn't actually paying attention to. But only the real journalists get to write about the bullshit in the speech itself, so Stanley instead babbles some sub-sportswriter-by-way-of-David Broder nonsense about "Dynasties" playing themselves out in some grand Wagnerian opera just behind the scenes (and also in front of the scenes, on stages and behind podiums and such). Because the Bushes and the Kennedys and the Clintons were all sorta there, in Washington, DC, where all of them spend most of their time.

Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley doesn't like that new Fox show with the lie detector. She dislikes is so much, in fact, that she reserved her trademark glaring inaccuracy for a statement about a game show on a rival network: "Before picking the correct suitcase to win $1 million on 'Deal or No Deal' Wednesday night, a contestant named Britney told the audience that her father was so nervous he placed Maxi Pads in his armpits." Oh, Alessandra. Britney took the deal and went home with $471,000. We can't verify the accuracy of the Maxi Pads story. [NYT]

There's only three ways the first line in the Telegraph's love-'em-up profile of Claire Danes makes sense: "There's something about the way that Claire Danes both looks and moves that makes you instinctively look down at her feet to check that they're touching the floor." Either she and Telegraph T.V. critic John Preston have crossed the Phantom Tollbooth, where one grows down not up with age, Claire Dane's got her porcelain hands on Marty McFly's hoverboard—or Preston is making a move on milady.

TimesTV critic Alessandra Stanley reviews the season premiere of "30 Rock" and finds it lacking. She places some of the blame on guest star Jerry Seinfeld: "[Seinfeld] shows up at Rockefeller Center to complain, and that's when the show goes a little wobbly: Mr. Seinfeld is strangely ill at ease playing himself, making his self-impersonation unpersuasive." How unfortunate! If only Seinfeld had any prior experience portraying a stand-up comedian named Jerry Seinfeld! [NYT]

That white witch Alessandra Stanley doesn't like the CW's "Gossip Girl." In today's Times, she faults the show for not being as good as the books; while they "are often criticized as a devolution from Judy Blume's coming-of-age novels, they are actually closer to children's literature. Like 'Peter Pan,' 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' or the 'Harry Potter' series, these novels are fantasies and projections of an imaginary world where parents are dead or peripheral, and lost boys and girls struggle on their own with good and evil, or in this case, Bergdorf Goodman and evil." Oh yeah? Screw you, Bruno Bettelheim, you don't mess with the most amazing show OF THE YEAR. [NYT]

Tomorrow's corrections today: "Mr. Rove, who is leaving the White House at the end of the month, didn't cut an especially heroic or villainous figure. The strategist who looms in the public imagination as a political mastermind and West Wing Svengali used a rare appearance on camera to deliver an exiting White House aide's most time-honored Washington message: mistakes were not made, and it's not my fault. He even denied responsibility for his hip-hop performance as a rapping 'M.C. Rove' at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in March." Rove was right to deny responsibility: The performance in question occurred at the Radio & TV Correspondents' Association dinner. [NYT]