Over the years, I have often written about embarrassing corrections in the New York Times. Partly because it is fun, but mostly because such corrections shed light on that paper’s persistent biases. Today’s paper had a good example, a correction of a front-page story on how Iowa voted for President Trump in the 2024 election, but Trump’s policies have devastated Iowa’s economy. (“In Trump-Friendly Iowa, the President’s Policies Have Hit Hard”) This is the correction:
An article on Monday about the impact that President Trump’s policies have had on Iowans included an outdated figure for the change in Iowa’s economic output in the first quarter of 2025. According to a revised estimate by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, it contracted at a 1.2 percent annual rate in the quarter; the bureau’s initial estimate was a “6.1 percent contraction.”
The claim that Iowa’s economy contracted by 6.1 percent in the first quarter was the centerpiece of the Times story. The correction destroyed the entire point of the article. But beyond that, a couple of things stand out.
First, President Trump was not even inaugurated until well into the first quarter, and his policies could hardly have had any perceptible effect on Iowa’s economic growth (or lack thereof) during that quarter. So the Times’ whole premise was deceptive.
Second, why was the Times talking about first quarter numbers on October 27? Weren’t second quarter numbers available by then? They were, indeed they were. The BEA came out with second quarter data, along with the revised numbers for the first quarter that the Times apparently missed, on September 26, a month before the Times published its anti-Trump piece: Iowa’s economy expanded by a robust annual rate of 3.7 percent in the second quarter. So the Times story could have had no purpose, but to mislead the paper’s readers.
Years ago, the people who run the New York Times decided to substitute liberal activism for competent reporting. It was, I think, a conscious choice. We have seen the results over and over: you should never trust anything that you read in the New York Times.
