Alessandra Stanley
Alessandra Stanley is an American journalist. In 2002 she became the television critic for The New York Times. She was previously co-chief of the paper's Moscow bureau.[1] She was also briefly stationed at the Times's Rome bureau.
Controversies
There have been some complaints regarding the accuracy of her reporting.[2][3] Her column of September 5, 2005 drew particular attention. Discussing coverage of relief efforts following Hurricane Katrina, Stanley wrote that Geraldo Rivera "nudged an Air Force rescue worker out of the way so his camera crew could tape him as he helped lift an older woman in a wheelchair to safety."[4] Rivera complained that the story was inaccurate and threatened to sue. The executive editor of the Times, Bill Keller, reviewed the videotape on which Stanley based her account, and concluded that no correction needed to be run, a decision for which he was faulted by the paper's Public Editor, Byron Calame.[5]
Stanley is credited with introducing the word "blondenfreude", in reference to Martha Stewart.[6]. She also became known for discussing the impact of The Colbert Report and its introduction of the word "truthiness", although she initially misreported the word as "trustiness",[7] for which the Times later ran a correction. She discussed "truthiness" in a later article (properly identifying it this time), as one of eight words that had captured the zeitgeist of the year 2005.[8]
In 2006, Stanley wrote a review of the Path to 9/11 television movie in which she stated that the portrayal was "even-handed," and backed the film's position that Clinton was too distracted by the Lewinsky affair to catch Bin Laden. She cited the 9/11 Commission as the source for this contention.[9] However, the 9/11 Commission had actually concluded that the scandal did not distract the Clinton administration from the terrorist threat. The New York Times issued a correction in the Sat., September 9, 2006 edition of the paper.[citation needed]
Conservative critics such as Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly have accused her of biased reporting.[10]
Personal
Stanley is a daughter of Timothy W. Stanley, an authority on defense policy who served in the 1960's as assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara for NATO force planning and then as a defense adviser in the United States mission to NATO,[11] and Nadia Leon Stanley.
Stanley was previously married to Michael Specter,[12] a former reporter for the Washington Post, The New York Times and The New Yorker. She lives in New York City with her daughter, Emma and nephew Mickey.
Stanley is a 1977 graduate of Harvard University.[12]
Among Stanley's close friends at the Times are Jill Abramson and Maureen Dowd. Both are mentioned prominently in the New York Magazine article, "The Redhead and the Gray Lady," by Ariel Levy.[13]
She lives in New York City with her daughter Emma and nephews Timothy and Mickey
External links
- Alessandra Stanley articles on New York Times website - registration required
- 2003 / 2004 Alessandra Stanley topic index - TimesWatch.org, a Media Research Center project dedicated to "documenting and exposing the liberal political agenda of the New York Times"
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