No doubt most of you remember the Jayson Blair affair at the New York Times, when the paper jettisoned the reporter for publishing several plagiarized and, at least partially, fabricated stories on its front page. The ensuing brouhaha caused an editorial shake-up at the onetime “newspaper of record.”
Well, what’s the old saying about the “second time as farce”? [I think it's from Marx.-ed. So it is.] This time the paper has outdone itself by publishing a putative letter from the mayor of Paris, attacking the potential elevation of Caroline Kennedy to the US Senate:
To the Editor:
As mayor of Paris, I find Caroline Kennedy’s bid for the seat of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton both surprising and not very democratic, to say the least. What title has Ms. Kennedy to pretend to Hillary Clinton’s seat? We French can only see a dynastic move of the vanishing Kennedy clan in the very country of the Bill of Rights. It is both surprising and appalling.
With all the respect and admiration I have for Ms. Kennedy’s late father, I find her bid in very poor taste, and, after reading “Kennedy, Touring Upstate, Gets Less and Less Low-Key” (news article, Dec. 18), in my opinion she has no qualification whatsoever to bid for Senator Clinton’s seat…
It goes on a bit, but I hadn’t gotten this far when I already suspected the letter was a put-on – and I’m the gullible type who is the last to get the joke at parties. But I’m nothing compared to the naive editors at the Times. Evidently, they were all a flutter about getting a personal missive from the Mayor of Paree himself and published it straight away without so much as a fact-checking overseas phone call. [Don't they have Skype?-ed. Apparently not.] Fortunately for the Times they caught this faster than the Blair Affair and published the following apologia:
Editors’ Note: December 22, 2008
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.
We did not do that. Without that verification, the letter should never have been printed.
We are reviewing our procedures for verifying letters to avoid such an incident in the future.
Yes, to be sure.
Hat-tip to reader Belladonna Rogers who passed this on; otherwise I might not have seen it. I haven’t been keeping up with the New York Times of late. I let my subscription lapse (belt-tightening, you understand…wink).
True, false, NYTimes gets punked? As if it makes a difference…
“We are reviewing our procedures for verifying letters to avoid such an incident in the future.”
Huh? Was that actually said with a straight face? Did the New York Times just open its doors last week? Verifying the identity of letter writers is ho-hum journalism 101. A phone call placed in New York City to Paris probably does not cost more than a few dollars. Double-checking the authenticity of the letter should have taken no more than an hour. I would also think that the Times has a number of people who speak adequate French. This incident, alas, is merely further evidence of the once great paper’s lowering standards.
“Paper of Record” becoming “Paper of Regrets”.
Huh? All this brouhaha over what???
I’m sure Mr. Delanoë (or his publicist) is kicking himself for not actually writing the letter.
It’s time to pull the fact-checkers out of Wasilla.
One thing very noteworthy about all of this, The brightest and best are staying well away from US politics, as evidenced by our last elections. This recent revelation shows that fact to be very true for the foreseeable future. Watching the Clown antics of the NYT, Journalism is apparently a lot like politics. No comparison to Roger of course. Roger L Simon is well above the bar and doing a great job.
NYT…big bogey, always. Always bad, always devious, always biased, always incompetent. I’m reminded of a little dog waiting under the table for a little scrap of food to fall. Oh, see, see! Look, look! Something fell! I got something to eat. Ha, ha, you are no good!
The editors and factcheckers must have taken the week off.
The NY Times is still publishing? Who knew?
Frankly, I’m disappointed. You’d think a street-wise NYC whore would know better.
It’s just one more example of them following the most basic rule of the new journalism: If they want it to be true (want it really, really bad) then they throw away their normal rules and publish it without a whole lot of checking.
Usually the technique is deployed against Republicans but I guess they are not particularly particular. Of course they then look like fools when they’re caught out and their lack of professional is displayed for all to see. In their moment of shame they promise to never do it again but they have proven they are like a meth addict who just can’t stop.
Interesting that they did not check this. I note that when I send a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe, owned by the NYT, their policy states that I will be contacted before they print my letter and the couple of times they have printed my letter I was indeed contacted to see if it was OK to print it. I guess when the letter goes along with their policy it is not necessary to vet it.
SOMEBODY owes Sarah Palin a ceremonial ‘last straw’, perhaps a gold plated last straw on a silver stand, with embedded gems… an unforgettable last straw from which Sarah can proudly drink and celebrate the hypocrisy of the News thats Unfit to Print..
What’s next, a text message from the trade secretary of Palookaville revealing Bush state secrets? What? There’s not really a Palookaville? Oh god, another apology page on Sunday…
Kudos to Belladonna.
My initial reaction was schadenfreude.
My second was a genuine sadness at the steady decline of this fine newspaper. It fell off the cliff under Howell Raines, and it has continued running downhill, with only the occasional application of bad brakes. The latest Sulzberger to run the paper is a far cry from his predecessors and seems incapable of correcting either the fundamental problems in the newsroom or in the business office.
Alas, we are all losers when our country’s leading institutions for news and analysis, the NY Times foremost among them, shrivel and decay.
Commenting on David Thompson’s comment, The New York Times actually has a Paris bureau, complete with a Paris bureau chief, Steven Erlanger, who’s been with The Times since 1987. A quick call or email to him from the Letters to the Editor editor and a check by him with the Paris mayor’s office would have spared the paper further embarrassment. But apparently, further embarrassment is exactly what the Gray Lady has in her future, at least until the day that the NYT is bought by someone who bothers to care about such pesky details as facts and accuracy.
One dead giveaway that this was a fake was the sentence, “We French have been consistently admiring of the American Constitution.” Zees grammar is written as eef by a faux Frenchman trying to sound like zee genuine article. What French “have been consistently admiring of the American Constitution”? Other than the French affection for Jerry Lewis, the Marx Brothers, le Jazz Hot, les blue jeans, and now, zee Big Mac, I haven’t noticed a lot of “consistent admiration” of anything American since Jean Seberg—certainly not our Constitution.
A real editor at a real newspaper would assign several reporters to track down who sent this letter, but instead the NYT will be spending its time “reviewing procedures for verifying letters.” That should take all of about two seconds, since they evidently have no such procedures to review.
Sorry to have misspelled David Thomson’s name.
Didn’t they get suspicious when the e-mail came from BigDaddyofParis69@aol.com?
“The New York Times actually has a Paris bureau, complete with a Paris bureau chief, Steven Erlanger, who’s been with The Times since 1987.”
There you have it. Erlanger served for several years as the Times’ chief correspondent in Israel, and his “reporting” consisted almost entirely of an unfiltered sewer of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas propaganda. To call him a lying scumbag would be an insult to condoms everywhere.
“I would also think that the Times has a number of people who speak adequate French.”
I think “adequate” may be an inadequate adjective in this instance.
Perhaps Princess Caroline could float the trial balloon of annexing Montreal and Quebec to strengthen the bond avec les Nouveaux Yorqois?
When the NY Times stopped caring about the truth long ago, they stopped caring about “mistakes”. It not that they were careless in this instance, it’s that they could care less in the first place.
After you have long since crossed the line concerning whether you print the truth, facts no longer matter. And they haven’t for quite a while at the dying, necrotic, graveyard that has become the once “paper of record”.
Bob Owens’ piece about how William Ayers was allowed to “cleanse” that paper’s “record” and they, (of course) found some weasel-worded way to blockade, hinder, and obscure any facts from being presented to expose the conspiracy between the propagandist and the NY Times…although that’s redundant.
To merely suggest that the NY Times has actively engaged in advancing an anarchist, or continues to…advance the causes of sworn enemies, foreign and domestic, is to not expose their conspiracy strongly enough.
That institution is now a one note parody of its former self. And anyone…anyone…who continues to accept a paycheck there, without comment about the fundamental loss of ethics, is himself without shame or conscience.
I like a few writers (very few) who remain on staff and are waiting in the gallows for its final whimpering collapse. But frankly, the paper has so shamed itself, so degraded its product, that the grand illusion that it somehow ELEVATES a columnist to have a byline there, is to at once live in the past while denying the present and mooning the future.
A writer of conscience can no longer accept a paycheck from this dying, wrinkled, old hag of a daily. It’s no longer relevant, it’s no longer respectable, it’s no longer chic and it’s no longer tethered to journalistic ethics.
The NY Times is a sad parallel of the former Soviet Union…built upon a power it did not deserve, an honor it did not earn, a respect it threw away and an arrogance that at once caused its collapse and yet it carries with it to the end.
Only Walter Duranty could be proud of an association with it today. The NY Times is a national disgrace. And any man or woman of honor would first say so, then leave.
cfbleachers: Excellent comment, but I have one point of disagreement. You said “it’s no longer chic”. I would argue that it is still chic. For many liberals it is just one more status brand: Prada, Gucci, Lexus, NYT.
Well, that’s a relief.
Mayor of Paris + Caroline Kennedy = WTF?
How could this not have set off BS alarms in the heads of all those tough, seasoned, cynical, hard-bitten, two-fisted, cigar-chomping, globe-trotting reporters at the NYT?
Or don’t they have those anymore?
I let my subscription lapse (belt-tightening, you understand…wink).
You were lucky, or smarter than I was. When I tried to drop the subscription some years ago, I found that the credit card I had used to pay ( big mistake not repeated; no wonder they want you to do that ) would not cancel the charge and they kept making it. I finally had to cancel the card.
Even at my 1,500 circ paper in tiny Eclectic, Ala., Kevin, my prized copy editor, wouldn’t dream of running a letter before speaking with its author.print’s only future is hyperlocal, putting me in position to pity my big-paper ‘betters.’ So sweet. So sweet.