The New York Times has corrected its massively botched story on the San Bernardino terrorists. Kinda sorta. The story by past reporting-botchers Matt Apuzzo and Michael Schmidt, which centered on the politically loaded claim that Tashfeen Malik had openly supported jihad in her social media posts and that the U.S. government had missed this in screening her for a visa, now has this three-paragraph editor's note:

The original version of this article, based on accounts from law enforcement officials, reported that Tashfeen Malik had “talked openly on social media” about her support for violent jihad. On Wednesday, however, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said that online communications about jihad by Ms. Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, involved “direct, private messages.” His remarks indicated that the comments about jihad were not made in widely accessible social media posts. Law enforcement officials subsequently told The Times that Ms. Malik communicated with her husband in emails and private messages, and on a dating site. Ms. Malik’s comments to Mr. Farook about violent jihad were made on a messaging platform, officials said. Neither Mr. Comey nor other officials identified the specific platforms that were used. (This article and headline have been revised to reflect the new information.)

The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple highlights the change in the story’s lede, which went from:

None [of the background checks] uncovered what Ms. Malik had made little effort to hide — that she talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad. She said she supported it. And she said she wanted to be a part of it.

To:

None uncovered what Ms. Malik had said online about her views on violent jihad. She said she supported it. And she said she wanted to be a part of it.

That’s a big change even though the second version still doesn’t make clear that Malik said what she said online privately and under pseudonym, which is to say that she absolutely did make an effort to hide it. Wemple accurately describes this and other changes—including to the story’s headline—as “an attempt to retrofit a factually poisoned article with replacement parts that don’t fit.”

That’s just what the Times did with Apuzzo and Schmidt’s similarly botched Hillary Clinton email story last summer, as Hunter pointed out earlier. And, as he also pointed out, both stories were botched in ways that fit perfectly into Republican narratives and both stories became a big part of Republican narratives, with this week’s story featuring prominently in the Republican presidential debate. The next big expose the Times needs to do is on just what the hell is going on with its own reporting.