The correction is the most underrated journalistic form. Almost no one reads them except other journalists. But read properly, each one tells a little story not just of what the journalist got wrong, but how they missed it. Sometimes that story is pretty dull: Names can be spelled many ways! But sometimes it’s a revealing tale, and that’s what you’ll find in the whopper of a correction that Time issued last week:
“The original version of this story mischaracterized as false Donald Trump’s statement in the presidential debate accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of supporting ‘transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.’ As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris filled out a questionnaire saying she supported taxpayer-funded gender transition treatment for detained immigrants.”
The mistake is understandable, to a point, because it sounds too bizarre to be true. (It also slipped past the legendarily persnickety fact-checkers at the New Yorker.) The fact that Kamala Harris endorsed a policy so extreme that it sounds like an urban legend tells you just how badly Democratic politicians misunderstood their voters in 2019 — just as its peremptory dismissal by two publications tells you how badly many of those voters still misunderstand their politicians today.
Rank-and-file Democrats do have a vague, general sense that the party tacked too far to the left four years ago. (In........