Experts who read blogs or newspapers regularly and carefully of course should not have been surprised at Obama's ongoing "centrism." But millions of people not just voted for Obama, but donated to him, based on little more information than what they picked up from his campaign, speeches, and occasionally glimpsed TV coverage. That's just an empirical fact. Perhaps we can blame them for being ill-informed, but most didn't really have the information to know they were ill-informed, nor any idea how to get more informed -- nor did the care very much. But millions of them, if they had to cite one word to describe Obama, would choose "change." (Check the NES survey when it comes out, or other ones with open-ended questions, to confirm this.) So those millions who thought Obama promised change but have paid enough attention now to see that this was at best a gross exaggeration, are a bit disappointed. True, they could have discovered otherwise during the campaign as we high-information voters did -- but it shouldn't be surprising to us that there are millions of "change" voters who are now, and will continue to be, very disappointed. And even though I myself knew better, I can't say I blame them.

Mmm, journalistic condescension and copyright fanaticism -- two great tastes that taste great together.

Well, you can say "What -- specifically -- did I write that was inaccurate? Don't use the sub-headline -- use what I actually wrote in the body." But just because you demand that he not mention the sub-headline, doesn't mean that he's not allowed to. The sub-headline reads: "Britain convicts Terrorists entirely within the law; the NYT claims that's proof that law-breaking is necessary." Neither the NYT nor Mackey claimed this. I agree with all of your other criticisms of his post (in particular, the implicit position revealed by his choice of question at the end), but he's got you stone cold on the sub-headline -- it's inaccurate. The "NYT" didn't claim it, a reporter did; it wasn't a claim, it was implied; and it wasn't implied that the story was proof of necessity, only that it may help justify law-breaking. Nor is this error trivial: headlines and sub-headlines aren't just additional matter tacked on, any more than his question at the end of his post was just innocent matter tacked on. The sub-headline makes a factually false accusation, and deserves to be changed, just as his original post was.

So first off, I notice the sub-headline has been silently emended. I presume you stand by your actions, and would not have changed it if it didn't matter, so a) props for conceding that the sub-headline does matter, and that there is a difference between "claim" and "suggest," and b) boo for quietly doing it without explicitly acknowledging that you were wrong anywhere (and apologies if you did say so somewhere in the letters and I missed it). For someone who so often emphasizes the inability of others to say when they're wrong, you're not so great at it yourself.

Second, we have

Me: The "NYT" didn't claim it, a reporter did

You: That's absurd. What NYT reporters write is, by definition, what the NYT says. Did the NYT break the story of the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program? Did the NYT report that Saddam Hussein was purchasing aluminum tubes for building nuclear weapons? Did the NYT report yesterday on the conviction of these terrorists?

It may be wrong, but it isn't absurd. If you look carefully at how the agency and authorship of newspapers is phrased, it's usually the case that when reporters for the NYT report matters of fact (ie, reporting news stories), those reports are attributed to the NYT: the NYT reports X or Y. However, when it is a matter of opinion, the usage is usually that if it is on the masthead editorial page, one says "The NYT claimed that Republicans were being dishonest," or whatever. But when it is a column written by a regular columnist, or an article flagged as "Analysis," then the opinion is usually attributed to the author, not the NYT itself (and there are additional nuances when it is, say, a movie review). As a factual matter of language use, almost no one says that the "NYT claims X" when X is an opinion implicit in an article written as a piece of reportage. And that is a reasonable practice: we know how to distinguish a reporter's opinion from the Editorial Board's, and it is worth making that distinction. Such points only hold more strongly when it is not an article appearing in the paper version, vetted by teams of editors, but rather is an online post by a reporter. Yes, the NYT takes responsibility for all articles posted on its website, but as readers, we know that even the explicit opinions there -- let alone the implicit ones -- are not those of the institution as a whole. And, indeed, common linguistic practice reflects this knowledge. Again: you may think that this is the wrong way to do things, and that every position implicit in every post by every writer should be attributed without distinction to the New York Times as a whole -- but such a desire to maintain distinctions is commonplace, reasonable, and not absurd.