It's Official: New York Times Columnists Make Mistakes

And Paul Krugman makes quite a lot of them.

Editorial page editor Gail Collins announced in a "letter from the editor" in the Sunday Week in Review that the paper's corrections policy for its news pages would now apply to Times columnists as well.

Collins doesn't let this mea culpa pass without getting a cheap shot in at an embattled former Bush official: "A 'For the Record' column of errata will run under the editorials whenever it's appropriate. The first one appears today. It corrects several misstatements about when Joe Allbaugh, the former FEMA director, met his successor, Michael Brown, now legendary as a disaster in his own right. Although there have been multitudinous references throughout the media to the two as former college chums or college roommates, they in fact went to different schools."

Indeed, the herd of liberal independent thinkers on the paper's roster of columnists managed to make that exact same mistake four times, Paul Krugman doing it twice, joined once by Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich.

Collins concludes with a blogosphere-inspired correction of an infamous claim by the paper's most popular Bush-hating columnist, Paul Krugman.

As Greg Sheffield points out elsewhere on NewsBusters, this marks the fourth correction on the same Krugman column, the first three of which were insufficient in various ways (some were run only on the paper's website, which makes them inaccessible anyway to many thanks to the paper's new pay-for-content scheme for columnists, TimesSelect).

The Eu Rota blogger suggests more possible corrections, indicating the paper may have to buy up more newsprint.

For more New York Times bias, visit TimesWatch.