Political Correctness Runs Wild

The Los Angeles Times has been blamed for occasionally placing political correctness above accuracy. But not many thought that problem would affect an opera review.

So imagine critic Mark Swed's surprise when he woke up on the morning of Feb. 24 and read the following passage from his review of a Richard Strauss opera: "[The opera] is an incomparably glorious and goofy anti-abortion paean."

Now the problem is that the opera has absolutely nothing to do with abortion.

Here is the original passage that the Times editors changed: "[The opera] is an incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean."

It appears that the politically correct reflex of Los Angeles Times editors is so compulsive that whenever they see the term "pro-life," they immediately insert "anti-abortion," even without checking to see if it makes any contextual sense.

OpinionJournal.com notes that the Times did run a correction, probably at the request of the reviewer. But that correction made it look like it was the reviewer’s mistake. So the Times issued yet another correction to blame the editors, not the reviewer.

Just another day at California’s journal of record.

And that’s the Asman Observer.