Tuesday, December 23, 2008
ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO PRINT
The New York Times is still considered the greatest newspaper in America and maybe the world. Perhsps that is all the proof we need that big time journalists are the most insipid people around. If you made it past high school, you learned when writing something factual to validate your sources. How many people at this newspaper failed to verify that a letter they printed was bogus?
Want to know why? I'll tell you anyway. Because journalists are very simple people that cannot carry complicated narratives through their minds. Thus somebody very simple decided that the Mayor of Paris had nothing better to do than trash Caroline Kennedy. This theme will be dominant with Obama. He fits a simple narrative of being brilliant and not George Bush. Anyway, here's the Times' apology.
Published: December 22, 2008
Early 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.
____
You do that bishes. Maybe they'll start teaching how to do that at Sarah Marshall...I mean Lawrence College.
The New York Times is still considered the greatest newspaper in America and maybe the world. Perhsps that is all the proof we need that big time journalists are the most insipid people around. If you made it past high school, you learned when writing something factual to validate your sources. How many people at this newspaper failed to verify that a letter they printed was bogus?
Want to know why? I'll tell you anyway. Because journalists are very simple people that cannot carry complicated narratives through their minds. Thus somebody very simple decided that the Mayor of Paris had nothing better to do than trash Caroline Kennedy. This theme will be dominant with Obama. He fits a simple narrative of being brilliant and not George Bush. Anyway, here's the Times' apology.
Published: December 22, 2008
Early 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.
____
You do that bishes. Maybe they'll start teaching how to do that at Sarah Marshall...I mean Lawrence College.
# posted by Jay @ 10:12 AM 
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