Apollo 11 fever grips nation on 50th anniversary of historic lunar mission
From Cape Canaveral to Washington, D.C. and Huntsville, Alabama, Americans are celebrating NASA's out-of-this-world achievement.
The New York Times issues an embarrassing correction to an essay on gender bias in American space exploration that was largely lampooned even when it was presumed to be accurate.
The essay celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing with a "woke" feature that retroactively criticized NASA for gender bias. One of the key examples was that the SpaceX’s Dragon crew capsule was “tested an optimized for an all-male crew,” but that was apparently inaccurate.
“An essay about gender bias in American space exploration misstated the genders of people involved in testing of the SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule,” the Times wrote Tuesday. “The testing included both men and women, not only men.”
NEW YORK TIMES CELEBRATES APOLLO 11 ANNIVERSARY WITH 'WOKE' PIECE ON NASA’S 1960S GENDER BIAS
The essay, penned by author Mary Robinette Kowal and headlined, “To make it to the moon, women have to escape earth’s gender bias,” declared that NASA can learn from its failures as it aims to send women to the moon and beyond.”
The current online version makes no reference to the SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule other than the italicized correction beneath the essay.
Political satirist and “No Things Considered” host Tim Young told Fox News last week that he never considered NASA and the space flight program to be gender-biased. Young hasn’t changed his mind and criticized the paper for the mistake.
MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR’S FALSE CLAIM ABOUT FOX NEWS MORPHS INTO CONSPIRACY THEORY
“The New York Times proves once again that it's too woke to confirm facts."
“The New York Times proves once again that it's too woke to confirm facts,” Young told Fox News on Tuesday. “In the middle of their piece trashing NASA for being sexist so that they could get clicks, they literally just made up talking points that sounded right so that they could run with it.”
The original essay also “incorrectly stated that an astronaut had completed a spacewalk” because “Cady Coleman qualified for a spacewalk” but “did not perform one.”
Mediaite columnist Caleb Howe wrote that “two pretty major corrections” were made.
“It’s not partisan bias to see it that way. This change, which the New York Times obviously sees as minor, alters the character of the essay significantly,” Howe wrote. “The Times had to correct a gender bias essay that misstated gender bias.”
The Times’ correction page also noted that a separate article inaccurately “showed a view of Earth, not the moon.”
“In the middle of their virtue signaling article, they even made the incredible error of mislabeling a picture of the earth... the moon,” Young said.
Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox