[tsimionescu]

There's another angle here as well: I doubt NYT editors are familiar with Vietnamese spelling. If there are errors in the diacritics, they will not be able to spot them, and may end up with a text that appears more precise than it actually is. If they just remove all diacritics, no reader will be confused they avoid this potential for errors altogether.

[haskellshill]

"We need to remove information from the text because perhaps the author (who clearly speaks Vietnamese) may have made a mistake". Do you also think that we should remove all algebraic symbols from mathematics papers, because perhaps the author has made a mistake, and the audience may contain people that won't spot it?