New York Times prints (fake) letter from mayor of Paris

It's schadenfreude time! The New York Times today printed a letter to the editor highly critical of Caroline Kennedy as the recipient of Hillary Clinton's newly-vacated Senate seat. The author of the letter was supposedly the mayor of Paris, and that's how the NYT presented it.

Except, it turned out to be a merry prankster simply posing as that esteemed public official. Read the letter here.

For gloating purposes, the full correction from the NYT is in the extended entry.

Editors' Note: December 22, 2008 Earlier this morning, we posted a letter that carried the name of Bertrand Delanoe, 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.

Mon, 12/22/2008 - 15:38 · · Importance: 4