Over the weekend, I mentioned that the New York Times’s curious interpretation of an aside of mine had been enthusiastically reduplicated by newspapers from Chicago to Vegas to Sacramento and beyond. The Irish Times, an impeccably liberal newspaper, has now issued a correction:
In her column in last Saturday’s edition, concerning the difficulties being faced by President Obama, Lara Marlowe said that Canadian commentator Mark Steyn accused Obama of trying to establish a “personality cult” like Saddam Hussein or North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. This had been reported in the New York Times. However, what Mr Steyn actually wrote was “obviously we’re not talking about the cult of personality on the Saddam Hussein/Kim Jong-Il scale.”
I like the not so subtle way the Irish Times blames its error on the New York Times: Ireland’s newspaper of record should surely know better than to rely on America’s newspaper of “record”.
Meanwhile, the NYT itself is now playing Chinese whispers with its own reporting. David Carr, their media columnist, takes my “quote” to the next level:
During the school dust-up, a commentator on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show said the president was building a cult of personality analogous to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il.
Which is pretty much the opposite of what I said. For the record, I wasn’t a “commentator” on Rush’s show but the guest host. But then a New York Times snoozeroo media columnnist relying on his colleagues’ misreporting of a George Soros website’s synopsizing of a radio show he himself would never be bothered to listened to would seem to be a near perfect parody of a “media ethics watchdog” in action.
The one bit the Times got right is that I did express misgivings about the president’s “cult of personality.” But then so did Paul Krugman.
P.S. From the sound of things, it’s not worth going to the “public editor.”