I have finally heard from the L.A. Times Readers’ Representative on an error by David Savage that I pointed out to them on May 20. If I can distill the response to its essence, it was: we weren’t wrong, and even if we had been, so what?

The details are in the extended entry. It’s all ancient history about Priscilla Owen, and it involves an extended legal discussion. So if that’s not your bag, nobody will blame you if you move on to the next post.

On May 20 I ran a post noting that Savage had misrepresented a dissent by Priscilla Owen, in a negligence case. Savage had said:

There was the case of Dena Read, a woman who was raped in her home by a Kirby vacuum salesman. The company had not checked his background, which included being fired from a previous job for sex offenses. The woman won a $160,000 jury verdict, and the Texas high court upheld the award on a 6-3 vote.

Owen dissented, arguing that the salesman was an independent contractor. For that reason, Kirby should not be held liable, she said.

In fact, the rapist salesman’s status as an independent contractor was legally irrelevant to the dissenters, including Owen. (Had that been the key factor, the person who had hired the rapist would have been relieved of liability — but the court made clear that he was on the hook for damages.) The important fact to the dissenters was not the rapist’s status as an independent contractor, but the status of his employer as an independent contractor.

I wrote Savage a polite note, praising his article but noting this error. I copied the Readers’ Representative. Until yesterday, I never heard anything back. In a recent letter to the Readers’ Representative, I alluded to Savage’s previous mistake and the paper’s failure to correct it. She asked me what I was talking about and I forwarded her another copy of my original note to Savage.

I have now received the following response, which I interpret as saying, in essence: 1) we didn’t err; and 2) even if we did, who really cares?

You did copy us on this, I see now. In reviewing it back then, I didn’t believe that Savage had misstated Owens’ position on the case or that it was misleading to L.A. Times readers. Editors also didn’t think it warranted correction.

(Not only do I think Savage’s assessment was accurate, but I don’t think that a correction based on your analysis would have substantially changed the meaning of the story for readers of this, a general-interest paper.)

Sorry I didn’t get back to you then. In general, my top priority is to review an issue to determine if a correction is needed. If it is warranted, this office does what’s necessary to see that one gets published as soon as possible. However, when I don’t think a correction is needed, I’m not always as fast about getting back to the reader. But I don’t mean to leave something unaddressed if a reader truly believes that an error has been made.

(My emphasis.)

On whether Savage got it right, my previous post speaks for itself. It contains all of the relevant links, including the links to the dissents that Owen joined. I have reviewed those dissents once again and am as confident as ever that my analysis is correct, and Savage’s wrong.

Beldar had independently noticed Savage’s error. Responding to the language I quoted above from Savage’s story, he said: “Poppycock.” And he ended his post this way:

Whether you want your appellate judges to selectively warp the law in order to benefit particularly sympathetic individuals or not, surely we can all agree that newspapers and politicians ought to tell the truth about a judicial nominee’s written precedents. Here, the LAT simply didn’t tell the truth.

The Readers’ Representative evidently disagrees with the legal analysis of Beldar and myself. But she makes no specific argument challenging any aspect of my analysis. This despite the fact that I had taken the time to specifically point out exactly what was wrong with the story.

She implies that she read the relevant dissents — how else could she render an opinion on the accuracy of Savage’s analysis? — but she doesn’t come out and say she did. And I can’t help but wonder whether she really did.

But what I find really fascinating is the comment I emphasized in bold above: “I don’t think that a correction based on your analysis would have substantially changed the meaning of the story for readers of this, a general-interest paper.”

Is this a new standard for error correction? The paper corrects errors as trivial as the spelling of people’s names, all the time. Such errors certainly don’t substantially change the meaning of a story.

Here’s how I read this comment: I see that you have some long, boring analysis of how we supposedly got some legal issue wrong. Maybe we did, maybe we didn’t. I’m gonna say we didn’t. But even if we did, who cares? Our readers are not a bunch of legal Poindexters.

My response to that is simple. If it was important enough for Savage to say in the story, it was important enough for him to get right. He got it wrong — dead wrong — and the L.A. Times doesn’t seem to care.

And they waited so long to respond to me that I hardly care any more myself . . .