A loyal member of the cher public noticed this howler by Need You Ask in the online NYT earlier today:

Unfortunately for La Cieca (and, well, yes, for anyone else with journalistic standards — so sue me!) the Times has already managed to do one of their “Ministry of Truth” numbers on the offending paragraph — without, it should be noted, mentioning the earlier wildly erroneous version! Continued outrage after the jump.

“What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs-to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date . . . . All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.”

UPDATE: In the interest of full disclosure, La Cieca should note that the “howler” screenshot seen above is a reconstruction — that is, the original story was corrected and updated before anyone (anyone?) could get a screen grab. Another member of the loyal public (thanks, KKT!) did in fact get a screen grab of the early, uncorrected version of the Tristan review, so what you see at the top of this post is in fact precisely what appeared on nytimes.com earlier today before the gaffe was pointed out to the author.

Now, while we’re updating, let’s consider for a moment how Tony T. might have checked his facts here. There is, of course, the Met database (as dear Atomic Wings points out in the comments), which even includes an incriminating photograph of the elusive Voigt/Heppner pair.

Or perhaps a Times writer might think to check the archives of his own newspaper, right? Of course, La Cieca can see how one might dismiss the review of the Voigt/Heppner Lohengrin, since its author is notoriously unreliable. But shouldn’t Tommasini trust the author of the Times review of Les Troyens?