The New York Times bashed government programs by profiling a Katrina “victim” that couldn’t get aid, but failed to do basic fact checking. To be fair, the Times blames itself in this item (buried at the bottom of the corrections section):

An article in The Metro Section on March 8 profiled Donna Fenton, identifying her as a 37-year-old victim of Hurricane Katrina who had fled Biloxi, Miss., and who was frustrated in efforts to get federal aid as she and her children remained as emergency residents of a hotel in Queens.

Yesterday, the New York police arrested Ms. Fenton, charging her with several counts of welfare fraud and grand larceny. Prosecutors in Brooklyn say she was not a Katrina victim, never lived in Biloxi and had improperly received thousands of dollars in government aid. Ms. Fenton has pleaded not guilty.

For its profile, The Times did not conduct adequate interviews or public record checks to verify Ms. Fenton’s account, including her claim that she had lived in Biloxi. Such checks would have uncovered a fraud conviction and raised serious questions about the truthfulness of her account.

And the Times even mentions their error in a new article about the woman, on page B1:

Ms. Fenton was the subject of an article in The New York Times on March 8, more than a month after Brooklyn prosecutors, prompted by suspicious officials at the city’s welfare agency, began investigating her.

Yet this calls into question why the “paper of record” would fail to perform a routine check on the subject of a story. If they don’t check on the people they are writing about, do they check their informers sources?

And considering the amount of scrutiny that corrections like this receive these days, is sloppy fact-checking something new or has this been going on for decades? If sloppy reporting is not a new phenomena (which I suspect), then why the new-found scrutiny? Blogs?