No one can accuse The New York Times of papering over its mistakes. America's most famous newspaper today issued a formal correction to a review of a Broadway production of West Side Story published no less than 48 years ago.

In a further sign of just how seriously the newspaper takes its role as a newspaper of record, the "Gray Lady" also confessed that it had wrongly described John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, as a "former fighter pilot" in numerous stories over the past decade.

West Side Story, a musical love story set among the gangs of Manhattan, first opened at Broadway's Winter Garden theatre in September 1957 and ran for 732 performances.

It returned to the Winter Garden in 1960, when it was reviewed again for The New York Times, but one of the cast member's names was listed wrongly.

The paper's regular corrections column reported today: "A listing of credits on April 28, 1960, with a theater review of 'West Side Story; on its return to the Winter Garden theater, misstated the surname of the actor who played Action. He is George Liker, not Johnson. (Mr. Liker, who hopes to audition for a role in a Broadway revival of the show planned for February, brought the error to The Times’s attention last month.)"

Also today, The Times came clean on having referred to Senator McCain as a Vietnam-era "fighter pilot" when in fact he was shot down while at the controls of an A-4 Skyhawk - technically an attack aircraft rather than a fighter.

The distinction was mocked by the New York gossip blog Gawker, which pointed out that the Navy fighter pilot school known as Top Gun used the A-4 to simulate Russian MiG fighters and the aircraft effectively met all the main criteria for a fighter - speed, manouevrability and the ability to shoot down other craft - even if its primary role was as an attack bomber.

"The Times should not be so easily cowed, particularly when 12 years worth of coverage is at stake."

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