Pop quiz. See if you can identify what’s factually wrong with this story from the Los Angeles Times:

It used to always be the premium of the premiums. Now the cable pack’s catching up.
By Mary McNamara, Times Television Critic
April 19, 2008
REVOLUTION is a frightening, heady and often fatal business, but it’s what happens afterward that matters most. No one knows this better than the folks at HBO. “John Adams,” which comes to a close Sunday night, has devoted seven beautifully shot hours to defying the often overly patriotic legends of our past with a toothache-and-all portrait of a man who helped define modern democracy, albeit grumbling every step of the way.

In his portrayal of our second president, Paul Giamatti creates a man perpetually dissatisfied, disgusted by the preening ambition of politics even as he is infected by it. If his relentless crankiness was a bit hard for some of us to take in early episodes, in the second half of the series it makes much more sense. While exhorting angry men to throw off the shackles of tyranny offers many opportunities for rhetorical fabulousness, setting up a new government is a bureaucratic nightmare, with oversized personalities disagreeing over things both petty and fundamental. George Washington (David Morse) so quickly tired of the infighting among his Cabinet and vagaries of public opinion that he stepped down from the presidency after a single term. “I know now what it is like to be disliked,” he says to Adams, his perpetually disliked vice president.

I’ll bet you got it.

As most of us learned in grade school — or as one could have learned even by watching the “John Adams” miniseries this piece touches on — Washington served TWO terms, not one.

This is something evidently unknown not only to the Times Television Critic, but also to the copy desk of what claims to be one of the nation’s most important newspapers.

I recently told a friend that I’ve felt so sorry for Times employees that I’ve stopped picking on the paper. Despite its misspelling Allen Ginsberg’s name on the front page when he died. Despite the routine errors of both commission and omission. The paper has been shedding longtime employees left and right — including some friends of mine — and I do love reading the daily newspaper, so this is the cri de couer of a wounded lover. But by God, if you can’t even get right that the Founder, the “indispensable man” of American history, served EIGHT years and NOT FOUR, then perhaps you shouldn’t be publishing a newspaper.

(With all apologies to friends still writing for the paper.)

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