More on the Plane That Didn’t Crash, and ‘Truthiness’

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the plane that didn’t crash - that is, about a Lives piece in The Times Magazine that has drawn significant criticism from aviation experts including Patrick (“Ask the Pilot”) Smith and from James Fallows, a well-known journalist who writes for The Atlantic.

The magazine article, written in memoir style by the contributor Noah Gallagher Shannon, contains a number of assertions that these critics justifiably say are either murky or apparently false.

Mr. Fallows summarized the problems this way: “The most consequential discrepancies were maintenance records showing that the plane never had any real or suspected landing-gear problems, though a landing-gear failure was the main narrative premise of the piece; and that its entire flight time from takeoff in Washington to unexpected landing in Philadelphia was 42 minutes, versus the tense two hours of circling over Philadelphia to burn off fuel described in the article.”

Mr. Fallows last week interviewed the author, who is not a Times staff member. Mr. Gallagher agreed that he should have been more careful and he apologized to both The Times and its readers:

I guess the last month has instilled in me a greater need for careful scrutiny of my own work. It was driven home to me that it was wrong to give the impression of certainty, of fact, and the things I was a little uncertain or hazy on, I should have qualified those observations, and I think that would have been the better journalistic thing to do â€" or done more background research. But I didn’t at the time, and I have to apologize to the readers and The New York Times for that, and I take full responsibility.

The Times has continued to look into the accuracy of the article, even after publishing a blog post from Hugo Lindgren, the magazine editor. That post defended the piece on the grounds that it represented the author’s feelings and his memories accurately, which was its purpose.

I still feel the same way about the magazine article. As readable as it was, it wasn’t fully accurate in the way that Times journalism is expected to be.

A reader, Frank Spencer-Molloy, wrote to me about it this week, expressing his thoughts in strongly worded terms:

I hope you will find time to follow up on the now-ironclad case made by James Fallows and other aviation experts that a personal essay appearing in The New York Times Magazine recently was so factually flawed that it should have never been published. That case was cinched this weekend by the author’s admission that the premise of the article - and many incidental factual assertions - was wrong.

Hugo Lindgren’s dismissive reply to Fallows that the piece’s recitation of factual accuracies was secondary to the author’s subjective experience was insulting. Absolution by reason of truthiness covers a multitude of sins.

Readers, he concludes, had the feeling that they “were blown off.”

I understand his concern. The Times needs to stand for truth, not truthiness - yes, even in a memoir-style feature article in the magazine.

However, I disagree that Times editors have dismissed these concerns. I know that over the past several weeks they have been rechecking the article’s facts and talking repeatedly to the author.

I have reason to believe that in the next day or so, Mr. Lindgren may amplify his current note to readers. I’ll update this post if that comes about.

It would be a good move â€" as would linking to that blog post from the online version of the original article, which is not the case now. A straight-up acknowledgement of the factual problems of this article is the only way out of this.