Last weekend, The New York Times’s normally stately and uncontroversial Sunday Book Review became the unexpected platform for a surprising journalistic skirmish. In her assessment of Vanessa Grigoriadis’s new book, Blurred Lines, an examination of the ever-heated debate surrounding consensual sex on college campuses, writer Michelle Goldberg offered some praise before descending into a forceful critique of Grigoriadis for allegedly not having her facts straight. Goldberg’s accusations were unequivocal and, at times, savage. “When Grigoriadis moves away from individual dramas to broad cultural pronouncements, the book falters,” Goldberg wrote. “Occasionally she makes baffling errors that threaten to undermine her entire book.”

Grigoriadis’s response was fierce: she in turn chastened Goldberg for being the one with an insufficient grasp of the facts. “Not one charge she makes in her review is correct,” Grigoriadis wrote in a blistering, point-by-point rebuttal on her Facebook page. “Michelle performed some of her own (incompetent) journalism here.” Indeed, before the fracas went public, Goldberg’s piece had been appended with a monster correction.

The bizarre episode quickly became a subject of intense fascination within journalism and media circles. Washington Post media writer Erik Wemple published an exhaustive account of the contretemps on his blog, and various womens’ sites weighed in as well. In a statement on Twitter, Goldberg confessed that she would “give a kidney and five years of my life” to take back the erroneous assertions. Summarizing the affair, and expressing some frustration with the manner in which it was depicted, she wrote: “This whole thing is turning into a round robin of fuckups.”

Many journalists and media observers have sympathized with Grigoriadis, who appears to have suffered an authors’ worst nightmare—she spent years writing a book only to sustain an unfair skewering at the hands of a reviewer who didn’t appear to fully comprehend the work. But the review of Blurred Lines has itself set off a drama within the halls of the Times, where the hand-wringing this week has been considerable, sources there told me. “It’s being talked about a whole lot,” said one. Another said, “It’s sloppiness, and also a question of whether or not the public response was adequate. It’s a significant error.” A third journalist described the fallout as “humiliating.” The Times, after all, is a place where big mistakes are seldom forgotten, and the most egregious ones can quickly become epitaphs.

To make matters more interesting, Grigoriadis is on the masthead of The New York Times Magazine as a contributing writer. (She is also a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. An adaptation of Blurred Lines ran on the Hive.) And Goldberg, most recently a writer for Slate, was hired just a couple weeks ago as a columnist on the Times’s Op-Ed desk. She was the latest splashy appointment made by James Bennet, the paper’s august editorial page editor, who returned to the Times from The Atlantic last year and was regarded as a contender to one day succeed executive editor Dean Baquet.

Among the various Times sources I spoke with, there was speculation about how the event might reflect on Bennet, who has already endured a number of headaches during his first year and a half in the job—from backlash over the appointment of conservative-opinion columnist Bret Stephens and the publication of a controversial op-ed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince, to a defamation lawsuit filed by Sarah Palin. (Bennet was called to testify, but a judge eventually dismissed the case.) While the Blurred Lines review was commissioned prior to Goldberg’s September 6 hiring announcement, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the correction-laden piece wasn’t a good look for either Goldberg or her new boss. “It’s very bad optics for James,” a veteran Times kremlinologist suggested. Nevertheless, the masthead appears to have Bennet’s back. “James is doing a terrific job,” Deputy Publisher A.G. Sulzberger told me through a spokesperson, “not only with broadening the range of voices of the columnists and contributors in our Opinion Pages, but also pushing the department to become faster, more creative, and more digitally ambitious than it has ever been.”

Sources also noted the awkwardness of seeing a Times Magazine contributor and a member of the Times’s opinion staff entangled in such a tempestuous public scuffle. “The fact that they’re both affiliated with the Times is what makes it unusual,” yet another staffer told me. (One more twist: the Style section ran an adaptation from the book in August.)

Additionally, multiple insiders I spoke with wondered whether Goldberg’s errors would have in fact been caught if the Times still had a free-standing, centralized copy desk, as opposed to a new system in which copy-editing and fact-checking is handled by so-called “strong editors” within each department. As I recently reported, the elimination of the copy desk amounted to a seismic newsroom reorganization, and one that has produced a certain amount of anxiety and tumult as the Times continues its sometimes fraught transformation into a digital-first media outlet. “They were very strict fact-checkers, with no dog in the race,” a Times journalist said of the editors who made up the erstwhile copy desk. “They took pride in catching stuff like this.”

Others at the Times bristled at the notion that the copy desk would have saved Goldberg’s review, and there’s plenty of validity to that contention. It seems unlikely that even the most assiduous copy editor would have queried Goldberg on some of the very fundamental points she made. (Times copy editors may be strict fact-checkers but they don’t operate like magazine researchers, who often, and effectively, inspect every word in a given piece.)

If anything, the response to this controversy may simply underscore a sense of unease within the halls of 620 Eighth Avenue as the Times undergoes important and necessary changes. Change is hard for any company—but especially for a 165-year-old institution where tradition is so deeply embedded in the D.N.A. For its part, the Times emphasized to me its commitment to accuracy in the face of digital-first editorial streamlining. “Our editing standards and processes are the most robust and rigorous of any news organization,” said Danielle Rhoades Ha, a company spokeswoman. “We deeply regret when mistakes happen, but work to correct them as soon as possible. That’s always been the case in our newsroom, and it remains so.”