Monday, December 22, 2008

Pure Hilarity: NY Times Gets Pwned

Good thing they have those layers of editors and fact checkers to avoid colossal blunders like this.
Earlier this morning, we posted a letter that carried the name of Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, sharply criticizing Caroline Kennedy.

This letter was a fake. It should not have been published.

Doing so violated both our standards and our procedures in publishing signed letters from our readers.

We have already expressed our regrets to Mr. Delanoë's office and we are now doing the same to you, our readers.

This letter, like most Letters to the Editor these days, arrived by email. It is Times procedure to verify the authenticity of every letter. In this case, our staff sent an edited version of the letter to the sender of the email and did not hear back. At that point, we should have contacted Mr. Delanoë's office to verify that he had, in fact, written to us.
And the dumbasses published it!

Ha ha ha!

Really, they should try to apply some better standards of professionalism, like blogs do. This amateur hour bit really needs to stop.

H/T Hot Air.

Now, if they'd only apologize for the absurd hitpiece on George W. Bush from Sunday.

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