Posted on 12/22/2008 5:27:08 PM PST by bruinbirdman
The New York Times was forced to apologise on Monday after it published a fake letter, purportedly from the mayor of Paris, criticising Caroline Kennedy's bid for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat as "not very democratic".
"What title has Ms Kennedy to pretend to Hillary Clinton's seat?" the letter in Monday's edition of the newspaper said. "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."
In an note from the editor posted Monday on its website, the newspaper said the letter signed by Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë should not have been published because it violated the paper's standards and procedures.
"We have already expressed our regrets to Mr Delanoë's office and we are now doing the same to you, our readers," the Times said.
News of the hoax was first reported by France-Amerique, which published a story on its website on Monday. Jean-Cosme Delaloye, the Editor-in-chief of the French language monthly, which is based in New York City, said an employee read the letter in the New York Times on Monday morning and was sceptical.
"When we read the letter it just sounded very surprising, the choice of words sounded very surprising," he told The Associated Press. "When we called Paris to verify the information ... they were very surprised."
Virginie Christnacht, head of Mr Delanoë's press office in Paris, said the letter was a fake.
"We have asked the New York Times for a denial and an apology," she said. "Clearly, this was never sent by Bertrand Delanoë."
The Times blamed the mistake on a failure to verify the authenticity of a letter that arrived by email.
"In this case, our staff sent an edited version of the letter to the
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
(Yeah, I know that's not what Dan said but that's what he meant)
Caroline MUST be insane.
Doesn’t she know that the Kennedy’s have a nasty habit of dying prior to attaining office or while in it?
Old Media Death Watch .
but but he sign it mayor of Paris
Who perpetrated the hoax?
This from the same people who criticized Palin’s campaign for not properly vetting the “phone call” from Sarkozy.
Laughing at the NYT’s death throes feels so good it must be fattening.
SO what did the NYT report when Sarah Palin was called by some french radio guy claiming to be Sarkozy? Did they suggest she was a dummy for not knowing? Hmmm?
;-) Ah, you are quite right, my FRiend Deetes, & normally that would have been quite enough for a hoax as brazen as this one to have gone undetected forever by the idiots at the New York Times.
Indeed, were it not for the cunning analysis of an intrepid French Freepaire named Tête de Daim who discovered that the diacritic over the second e in Delanoë was in fact an umlaut & not a true diaresis as would have without qualification been the case had the letter actually been typed in France by the mayor himself, the fraud might have never been discredited at all.
It's a bit complicated, but as I understand it, it seems that in all computer systems distributed in North America, the windows-compatible keyboards use Unicode wherein both the German umlaut and the French diaeresis are represented identically. But on all MS keyboards distributed in France as well as the rest of the European continent this is apparently never the case & there is always a discrete albeit microscopically minute difference in the relative distance between the two dots for each language's respective diacritic.
This discrepancy, barely distinguishable to all but the well-trained eye, was a red flag for those two ever-vigilant multilingual french freepers Tête de Daim and Mlle. Hurlant, who concluded correctly that the anti-Caroline letter purported by the New York Times to have been written by the Parisian mayor could not possibly have been typed in France (where there was irrefutable documentary evidence the Mayor had been in residence on the date it was allegedly written), and could only have originated from a keyboard in North America by a mischievous imposter.
Once the hoax was discovered, it was only a matter of time before it was systematically exposed on a widely-read thread on the French Freepeaires' site, picked up by a number of conservative French bloggers who further publicized the fraud, et voilà!, the New York Times was forced once again to admit to the whole world that it doesn't have a single bloody fact checker on its incorrigibly incompetent staff!
Hey, yeah, that's right. Good catch!
Someone in the editorial section of the NYT is going to have a crummy Christmas and an even worse New Year. Job over, I'd guess.
The sweet smell of the Slimes burning in the morning ;)
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