The Sad Decline of Mainstream Media

The New York Times, in a piece on the decreasing popularity of college bars, has appended an editor's note:

An article on Thursday described the effect of social media use on the bar scene in several college towns, including the area around Cornell. After the article was published, questions were raised by the blog IvyGate about the identities of six Cornell students quoted in the article or shown in an accompanying photo.

None of the names provided by those students to a reporter and photographer for The Times — Michelle Guida, Vanessa Gilen, Tracy O’Hara, John Montana, David Lieberman and Ben Johnson — match listings in the Cornell student directory, and The Times has not subsequently been able to contact anyone by those names. The Times should have worked to verify the students’ identities independently before quoting or picturing them for the article.

Boy, those Times reporters are getting dumber and dumber. Any fool could have told them the real names of those individuals are Ima Hoare, Connie Lingus, Anita Woody, Dick Hertz, Heywood Jablome and Ben Dover, respectively.