This New York Times CD review of Broken Social Scene's new album resulted in this correction:
A CD review on Monday about the band Broken Social Scene and the album bearing its name misidentified its home city. It is Toronto, not Montreal.
But, as writer Douglas Bell notes in this Toronto Star article, the correction vastly understates the impact of this error.
"More or less every instance of Pareles' mistake - in fact the entire
review - is bullshit," he writes. "Because [the reviewer] believes the band to be from Montreal,
he attributes all sorts of their qualities as consistent with or
diverging from their fictitious hometown. At one point he even compares
their previous work favorably to Arcade Fire, a band that actually is
from Montreal, while at the same time denigrating BSS's work for
refusing to 'ride on Montreal's momentum.'"
Bell has a point. The review examines the band's album through the lens of its (incorrect) Montreal pedigree. To make matters worse, as of this writing its online version hasn't been corrected. The correction is there, but the article still refers to Montreal in several places. We suspect this is because the review requires an almost complete rewrite and no one has bothered to call for it. The Times should pull this article off the site, have it rewritten, and post a new, more expansive correction.
Some relevant excerpts from Bell's article:
...I dug up the Monday edition to read the review by Jon Pareles, whereupon I came across not one but four instances of the "mistake" that led to the "correction."
"Broken Social Scene is an alliance loosely led by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning; its members, now about a dozen, are also active in other Montreal bands..."
"The sound of 21st-century Montreal is coalescing as upbeat anthems overstuffed with instruments and eccentricities..."
"But Broken Social Scene refuses to ride on Montreal's momentum..."
"Broken Social Scene doesn't tamp down its Montreal exuberance."
The review concludes by denouncing the band for "confusing integrity with indulgence, burying good songs under way too much studio tomfoolery."
Pareles' mistakes weren't mistakes any more than the Times' lame correction corrected the misimpression conveyed by his mangling of the facts.
This is an example of what Princeton professor Harry G. Frankfurt so memorably analysed in his best-selling book, On Bullshit.
...Pareles and his editors, it turns out, were peddling manure. The bullshitter's eye, writes Frankfurt, "is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. ... By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."
More or less every instance of Pareles' mistake - in fact the entire review - is bullshit. Because he believes the band to be from Montreal, he attributes all sorts of their qualities as consistent with or diverging from their fictitious hometown. At one point he even compares their previous work favourably to Arcade Fire, a band that actually is from Montreal, while at the same time denigrating BSS's work for refusing to "ride on Montreal's momentum."
And all this from the same paper that suffered a collective nervous breakdown when Jayson Blair pulled the wool over its eyes.
...The lead sentence of Pareles' review stated: "There's a thick haze - part experimentation, part pretension, part perversity - over the songs on Broken Social Scene."
Ain't it the truth.
