Alessandra Stanley is the television critic for The New York Times. She is also a favorite target of the media watchers at Gawker, Regret the Error and Reference Tone -- which post evidence of her journalistic carelessness on a regular basis.

Reference Tone called her "The Wrongest Critic," and posted a list (a long list) of published corrections of Alessandra's work since 2001. The blog's conclusion: "The woman is clocking corrections at more than a monthly rate. And they are stupid, stupid errors."

Gawker started The Alessandra Stanley Watch, and conducted its own analysis to assess "How Wrong Is She?" Gawker's conclusion:

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.

We asked Craig Silverman, who documents media errors and corrections at Regret The Error, how Alessandra could skate by at The Times with such apparently poor fact-checking skills.

Craig's take:

I don't like the personal nature of the attacks on her, but she continues to make inexcusable errors. I call them inexcusable not because they are particularly egregious in the sense of their consequences. They are inexcusable because she is getting very simple things wrong on a consistent basis.

There's a side element to this: The New York Times -- the paper that created the modern correction format in the early 1970s -- does not as a rule indicate the source of an error in a correction. Some other papers will note that it was a reporter's error, or an editing error. It's possible that some of her errors were inserted by an editor, but we don't know because the paper doesn't specify.

At this point the errors in her work have become a distraction and I would hope that this is something that her editors are working with her to change. You can't just dismiss the criticism as blog chatter. Gawker and Reference Tone have proven that there's an issue here.

I would prefer to see someone receive training and extra attention before getting canned for making errors, but there is a point where you have to draw the line. Really, is it so hard to re-check all the names and titles in a piece before putting it in the paper? I understand the pressure on newspaper reporters to file quickly, but it's better to get it right than get it fast.

Craig currently is working on a book (publisher undisclosed) on the topic of media accuracy. At this rate, Alessandra may merit her own chapter.

Technorati tags: Journalism, Media, Newspapers, Critics