A post here yesterday pointed out a discrepancy between the Wall Street Journal, which said the SEC issues about 60 confidentiality waivers per quarter to investors, and the New York Times, which, paraphrasing a spokesman, said the agency gets about 60 such requests a year. The Times has since corrected its story to 60 a quarter.
The same Times article has a couple of other accuracy problems. It misspelled the name of an SEC spokesman — his last name is Nester, not Nestor. And, more significantly, it links to and quotes a September 28, 2010, SEC inspector general report about confidential treatment requests in corporation finance filings, which has little to nothing to do with the Buffett-IBM issue, rather than a different, September 27, 2010, SEC inspector general report that reviewed the SEC's Section 13(f) reporting requirements. The correct report was linked and cited here yesterday.
I gave credit yesterday to the Times reporter, Andrew Ross Sorkin, for having beat me to the point by about two hours. If the cost of the speed was three corrections in one story — well, the editors there will have to decide for themselves whether that's a worthwhile tradeoff, if indeed that was the tradeoff.
