Correction confusion

A correction uncorrected — or technically accurate? You make the call. Check out these excerpts from the New York Times concerning Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s reaction to President Bush’s plan to send more American troops to Iraq.

News story, Jan. 12:

The Iraqi leader, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, failed to appear at a news conference and avoided any public comment. He left the government’s response to an official spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, who gave what amounted to a backhanded approval of the troop increase and emphasized that Iraqis, not Americans, would set the future course in the war.

Correction, Jan. 13:

An article yesterday about the Iraqi government’s response to plans by President Bush to deploy additional troops referred incorrectly to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s absence from the government’s news conference. Mr. Maliki was never scheduled to speak; it was not that he “failed to appear.”

Editorial, Jan. 14:

Now, with Mr. Bush unwilling or unable to persuade Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to take the minimum steps necessary to justify any deeper American commitment, we recognize that even that has become unrealistic. Mr. Maliki gave the latest White House plan an even chillier reception than it received in the United States Congress, boycotting a Thursday news conference in Baghdad announcing it. He apparently would have preferred to see American forces sent to fight Sunni insurgents in western Anbar Province, leaving Baghdad as a free-fire zone for his Shiite militia partners.

It looks to me as though the Times editorial backs off the previous day’s correction and re-embraces the first account, in which it was reported that Maliki “failed to appear.” I don’t think you can “boycott” an event at which you were never scheduled to appear. So no, I’d say the editorial is not technically accurate, at least if the correction is, you know, correct.

Which raises a question: Does the Sunday editorial page go to bed so early that a correction published in Saturday’s paper can’t be taken into account? And even if that’s true, shouldn’t the Web version of the editorial have been updated?

More: Media Nation has been reliably informed that (1) the Sunday editorial page ships on Friday afternoon and (2) corrections generally don’t appear on the Web before they’ve been published in the print edition. So there you go.