Paul Krugman:

More broadly, the big problem with political reporting based on character portraits is that there are no rules, no way for a reporter to be proved wrong. If a reporter tells you about the steely resolve of a politician who turns out to be ineffectual and unwilling to make hard choices, you’ve been misled, but not in a way that requires a formal correction.

Similarly, if a columnist like myself tells you that “a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore,” and that assertion turns out to be unsupported by the evidence, and no correct correction is ever appended to the article making that assertion, then you’ve been misled — but I’ll fight a formal correction tooth and nail.

Whoops! Only the first paragraph is Krugman. I made up the second one. It’s how Krugman feels, but he hasn’t said so in so many words.

By the by, his August 19 and August 22 columns contain incorrect corrections (as described in this post) that still remain uncorrected to this very day. It’s clear by now that they will never be corrected. Ever.

Hence the filing of this post in the “Scum” category.

(Thanks to Shredstar for the pointer.)