NASHVILLE BLOGGER and former Tennessean journalist Bill Hobbs writes that the New York Times is recycling lies about Bill Frist:

Frist would be holding a handful of pencils to distribute and didn’t want to prick himself on one of the sharp points – but his innocuous comment was seized on by the anti-Frist reporters for the Memphis Commercial-Appeal and the Nashville Tennessean as “evidence” that Frist had been racially insensitive.

It was absurd then – a lie propagated by two newspapers that had already endorsed Frist’s opponent, the incumbent Sen. Jim Sasser – and most everyone in the newsroom at The Tennessean, where I worked at the time, knew it and was embarrassed by the story. It is even more absurd now for the NYT to recycle it in an attempt to undercut Frist as he ascends to the post of Senate Majority Leader.

Perhaps the Times will issue a correction, in due course.