The New York Times’ top seven fails of 2015

From censoring satirical cartoons, to publishing error-riddled stories, to reporting outright falsehoods, the 164-year-old newspaper will go into the New Year leaving behind a trail of mistakes and embarrassing flubs.

Here are the Times’ seven biggest fails of 2015 (in chronological order):

1. Censorship

The Times refused in January to publish certain cartoons depicting Islam and Muhammad, despite that the images were central to the story of an Islamic terrorist attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

“Was it hard to deny our readers these images? Absolutely. But we still have standards, and they involve not running offensive material,” Times executive editor Dean Baquet told the Washington Examiner’s media desk.

Citing the cartoons as justification, Islamic terrorists attacked the magazine’s Paris offices in January, killing 10 journalists and two police officers.

“I agree that the cartoons are central to the story. And it was hard as hell not to publish them. But to understand the real sensitivity of this issue you would have to publish the most sensitive images,” Baquet said.

“[T]hey don’t meet our standards. They are provocative on purpose. They show religious figures in sexual positions,” he added. “We do not show those.”

2. Baseless Accusation

The Times claimed in February that opposition to vaccines is unique to conservative voters.

The article offered no data or citation to back this claim. In fact, according to the Washington Post and BuzzFeed, it appears that the opposite is true: The anti-vaxxer movement is primarily a “liberal fringe issue.”

3. Late to Tell the Truth

The Times waited 22 days to correct a report that claimed the Supreme Court ruled viability for an unborn child occurs at “22 to 24 weeks after fertilization.”

In the original version of the story, the newspaper reported that, “Prohibiting most abortions 20 weeks after fertilization would run counter to the Supreme Court’s standard of fetal viability, which is generally put at 22 to 24 weeks after fertilization.”

This is not so.

The Supreme Court affirmed in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that a woman has a right to an abortion until an unborn child is viable outside of the womb. The court also said that, “viability is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks.” The Supreme Court never ruled that viability occurs “22 to 24 weeks after fertilization.”

The Times article, which was published originally on May 14, was not corrected until June 5.

Something similar happened again in August when it took the Times 16 days to correct a major mistake in report on Planned Parenthood.

The Times claimed incorrectly on July 21 that the Center for Medical Progress, the pro-life group behind the Planned Parenthood fetal tissue scandal, released its full, unedited video footage only after the nation’s largest provider of abortions had “complained of selective, misleading editing.”

Again, this is not so.

CMP made all of its unedited footage immediately available in July with the release of its first video, which featured a Planned Parenthood executive discussing compensation for donating organs salvaged from the remains of aborted children.

It took the Times more than two weeks to correct the error.

4. Selective Censorship

In June, just a few months after Baquet explained why the Times wouldn’t reprint “offensive” images of Muhammad, the newspaper published Niki Johnson’s “Eggs Benedict,” a portrait of Pope Benedict XVI fashioned entirely out of condoms.

The Times reasoned that there was a difference between Johnson’s handiwork and the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.

“There’s no simple, unwavering formula we can apply in situations like this. We really don’t want to gratuitously offend anyone’s deeply held beliefs. That said, it’s probably impossible to avoid ever offending anyone,” the Times’ associate managing editor for standards Phil Corbett told the Examiner.

He explained that Charlie Hebdo and Johnson are not “really equivalent.”

“For one thing, many people might disagree, but museum officials clearly consider this Johnson piece to be a significant artwork,” he said. “And finally, the very different reactions bears this out. Hundreds of thousands of people protested worldwide, for instance, after the Danish cartoons were published some years ago. While some people might genuinely dislike this Milwaukee work, there doesn’t seem to be any comparable level of outrage.”

5. An Error Per Every 380 Words

On Sept. 30, 2015, the Times published a 1,898-word profile on Melania Trump, wife of 2016 GOP front-runner Donald Trump, that contained nearly a half dozen errors.

The Times’ Guy Trebay’s mistakes were numerous, including that he misspelled the name of Wendi Deng Murdoch, ex-wife of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and that he incorrectly identified Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

A similar incident occurred on Dec. 20, 2015, when the Times published an article on a Brooklyn-based chocolatier that contained four errors. The report was barely 900 words long, meaning that its author, Sarah Maslin Nir, averaged one error per every 225 words.

6. Nailed It

The Times conceded in November that its much talked-about expose on New York City nail salons contained some pretty serious errors.

The admission came only after Reason’s Jim Epstein spent weeks fact-checking the newspaper’s reporting.

But worse than publishing a flawed series on nail salons, however, was that fact that Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan admitted that she and her colleagues initially ignored Epstein’s debunking of their story because of Reason’s libertarian leanings.

“Until now, The Times has not responded to [Reason’s] series because editors believe they defended the nail salon investigation fully when they responded to Mr. Bernstein’s complaints, and because they think the magazine, which generally opposes regulation, is reporting from a biased point of view,” she wrote.

Sullivan issued a similar admission of error in December after the Times reported inaccurately that one of the shooters involved in the San Bernardino massacre had stated her intentions openly on social media.

7. Obama Whitewash

The Times raised eyebrows in December after a 60-word paragraph regarding President Obama and American anxieties over terrorist attacks disappeared mysteriously from a report titled “Under Fire From G.O.P., Obama Defends Response to Terror Attacks”

The now-deleted paragraph read, “In his meeting with the columnists, Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments.”

“Republicans were telling Americans that he is not doing anything when he is doing a lot, he said,” it added.

After many saw those words as an admission that Obama erred by downplaying the attacks, the passage was later removed by the Times. An editor explained that the article was merely “trimmed for space.

But the original version of the report contained approximately 1,240 words. The updated, “trimmed” version contains more words, approximately 1,377.

Honorable mention:

In 2014, the New York Times passed on the chance to be the first to report on a little-known video of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber mocking the “stupidity of the American voter.”

Though the Gruber scandal occurred in 2014, news that the Times had ignored the story surfaced in May, 2015, when the man who uncovered the obscure video, Richard Weinstein, told the Examiner about his attempts to bring it to the press’ attention.

“Nobody would listen to me,” he said. “So I was trying to contact journalists directly because I had this stuff.”

Times reporter Robert Pear was the “first real journalist” that Weinstein contacted with the footage. Though Pear appeared at first to be interested in the story, he ultimately walked away.

The Gruber scandal was later broken by American Commitment, a conservative activist group, after it discovered the tape on Weinstein’s social media account. The story soon became a national scandal.

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This article has been updated.