Bravo, old sport

Christopher Hitchens

• Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Post-War America by Neil Jumonville
  University of California Press, 291 pp, £24.95, January 1991, ISBN 0 520 06858 0

Each morning, the great, grey New York Times publishes a box headed ‘Corrections’, which box makes a sort of running auto-adjudication on the performance of the journal of record. On one day, there is a matter of spelling or nomenclature set right. On another, a date or a place. Occasionally, the correction goes so far as to specify what the paper might, or even should, have said. Some see, in this parade of scruple and objectivity, a Victorian combination of public rectitude and private hypocrisy whereby the more influential subscribers get their chance to ‘set the record straight’. Others discern a sort of semiotic inquisition, useful for disciplining errant or over-imaginative reporters into the uses of impartiality. (Alexander Cockburn comes right out and says that its purpose is to convince the public that everything else in yesterday’s Times was historically and morally true.) Anyway, last November the paper ran a ‘Correction’ which is unlikely to be bested: