Rushing To Print
Well, The New York Times stepped in it today. They published a letter criticizing the attempt by Caroline Kennedy too be appointed to the US Senate. The letter was supposedly from the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë. Unfortunately for the Times, the letter was not. But without any fact checking whatsoever, they ran it anyway.
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.
Which led to this little gem from the editors when they discovered that the letter was a fake:
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.
About a year ago, I received an unsolicited email with supposed juicy news. Despite having somewhat less in the way of resources than the Times, I managed to fact check the email in short order and published it – along with the results of the fact check that exposed it as a fraud. Some rather bigger names than that of The Crabitat got burned on that one.
Not saying that anyone is above getting caught at times, I’ve also done that. Just saying that the impact of me being caught by an April Fool joke is rather a lot less than the purported paper of record failing to meet even its own minimal standards. It’s great to have a scoop – if it’s real.
Via Memeorandum
By Mockingbird, December 23, 2008 @ 5:22 pm
With their level of fact checking, I’m expecting that “The Paper of Record” publishes one day’s edition as “The Paper of Recrod”.