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It seems like the Gray Lady was wrong, was corrected by Wikipedia and never bothered to say so.

As Cory Doctorow posted today on BoingBoing ,the aforementioned Gray Lady Science article ("You Are Also What You Drink," posted originally on March 27) became a question sent to the Wikipedia help desk, where the submitter, JFarber, volunteers.

The article, which summarized a recent panel study on the health benefits of beverages, claimed that it was illegal to fortify soy milk with Vitamin D, and, because soy milk did not contain calcium, that the soy milk was not recommended as a substitute for cow's milk.

The NYT reported that claim as true, and used it to close their article.

Over the next 24 hours, the ref desk volunteers (including myself) followied the info back to its source, dicovered that the error was due to the original study's citation of a 1971 article on this point (which seems like pretty bad science, given how much nutritional laws have changed in that time)...and further tracked down plenty of evidence on both the public online documents of the Federal Register and on our own shelves which showed this claim to be absolutely false.

As of today, the Times has corrected the article (the BB link contains a PDF of the original, un-edited story.) So, why won't the Gray Lady fess up to a mistake? Was it because it got caught by a volunteer fact checker at Wikipedia?

Or better yet, are they just still annoyed that "new media" doesn't rely on lazy reporting from 1971 science articles?