There was a letter to the editor in the New York Times this morning from the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, bemoaning the sad state of our democracy here in the United States. His evidence? Caroline Kennedy’s attempt to get herself appointed to Hillary Clinton’s senate seat. “Surprising and appalling,” Delanoe wrote, a “dynastic move” on the part of the “vanishing Kennedy clan,” Kennedy has “no qualification whatsoever” to sit in the United States senate.
When I read it I thought, man, that seems… kinda undiplomatic. Delanoe may be right, but why would the mayor of Paris give a shit? Doesn’t he have shit to worry about? WTF?
Turns out the letter was a hoax—um, whoops.
The Times blamed the mistake on a failure to verify the authenticity of a letter that arrived by e-mail.
“In this case, our staff sent an edited version of the letter to the sender of the e-mail and did not hear back,” the paper said. “At that point, we should have contacted Mr. Delanoe’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.”
deaux
Dynastic rule is what makes America great.
#1, seriously, that was brilliant.
The real sadness is that the Mayor of Paris, home of the French Revolution and Paris Commune didn’t send the New York Times a letter about the Audacity of the American Aristocracy to claim everything that’s not nailed down as their domain.
I read that letter this morning and thought it was just a typical snobby Frenchman passing judgement. Fuck you, I thought. Then I meant to Google to figure out who this Delanoe character was. But I didn’t Google. And now I find out that it was all a hoax. How could they NOT verify this? Stupid.
Well here’s how you say it in English: Duh – not Doh.
Um. So I just reread the letter and saw that he said who he was in the first sentence. I totally missed that this morning.
@6 roberto, are you as humorless as you are pop-culturally clueless? Go watch The Simpsons sometime. Anyway, it is spelled: D’oh! with an apostrophe.
As to the question at hand:
1. The French don’t have a word expressing “D’oh!”, as far as I know. The closest is perhaps “Zut!”, or “Bon Dieu!”, or “Suce mon cul!”. Well, that last one isn’t correct exactly.
2. It’s not the French who would be exclaiming ‘D’oh!’, it is the NYTimes, since they are the ones who f*cked up.
dearest Sloggers, the mayor of Paris is an out homo – and – far smarter than this hoax
The Village Voice actually called me to check my facts before running my LTE. And the Christian Science Monitor did not run my LTE because I did not call them back in time.
Odd when the tabloids have higher journalistic standards than the NYT.
We Conservatives have been telling you the NYT was full of shit for years.
God it’s great to always be right.
http://www.france-amerique.com/articles/…
originally reported here
It will really be terrible if we lose the daily papers. People won’t know where to go for reliable, diligently checked information.
i can’t wait for newspapers to go under.
journalism schools don’t teach reporting:
‘I got the equivalent of Britain’s Pulitzer Prize for [my story investigating Tony Blair]. That’s because I didn’t know shit about journalism. If I had, I would’ve just made a few phone calls and written, “This guy said this,” and, “That guy alleged that,” and, “Who can say?”’
journalists aren’t taught in school to fact check, investigate, think critically, or consider alternative explanations for lies told to them by marketers issuing press releases… or anything like it. why are we surprised when professional journalists fail to do these things?
nearly any blogger can do a better job of reporting than a journalism school graduate. and they’re not necessarily dependent on advertiser dollars, the way all print media, nearly without exception, is today.
can’t. wait.