The New York Times Magazine's Correction

I saw a shocking correction in the New York Times Magazine this Shabbos. Though the correction is in a small section at the bottom of the Letters to the Editor in the magazine, it corrects quite a major error.

The correction:

An article on Oct. 25 about the recent governor’s race in New Jersey misidentified the illegal activity that some Sephardic rabbis had been accused of and that the article characterized as part of the state’s infamous corruption. The rabbis were charged with money laundering, not with selling body parts and then using the money to bribe politicians. (There was a Brooklyn man accused of conspiring to broker the sale of a kidney, and several New Jersey politicians accused of corruption, all of whom were arrested the same day as the rabbis.)

And the original article. The original article had the text:

Unemployment has soared to nearly 10 percent (about even with the struggling nation as a whole, but significantly higher than in surrounding states) at the very same moment that the state’s infamous corruption has reached a level of near parody, with Sephardic rabbis accused of illegally selling body parts and using the money to bribe local politicians.

Motzaei Shabbos, this text still stood there, with the error not even noted in strike-out, though it was noted at the bottom of the article. As it stands now, the statement was revised to read:

Unemployment has soared to nearly 10 percent (about even with the struggling nation as a whole, but significantly higher than in surrounding states).

Good for the New York Times, to remove the offending portion of the sentence where it can bring to mind all sorts of anti-Semitic thoughts. (As in, a cabal of rabbis peddling body parts and using the money to control the government.) I am not sure whether a more prominent correction would be better in this case, or not.

But as of now, on the website of the author of the piece, Matt Bai, the paragraph still stands uncorrected, even as an earlier correction (from a week earlier, I think) as to New York as opposed to New Jersey was fixed and noted. Maybe it takes time to bring it to his notice.