In Monday’s newspaper, we published a letter over the name of the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, criticizing Caroline Kennedy. This letter was a fraud and should not have been published. Mr. Delanoë’s office has since confirmed that he did not write it.

Printing the letter, which also appeared on nytimes.com until it was removed, violated the standards and procedures of The New York Times editorial department.

It is our practice to verify the authenticity of every letter we publish. Like most of our letters these days, this one arrived by e-mail. We sent an edited version back to the writer of the e-mail and did not receive a response.

At that point, the letter should have been set aside. It was not.

The Times has expressed its regret to Mr. Delanoë’s office for the lapse in judgment that led to this error. We now express those regrets to our readers.

We will be reviewing our procedures in an attempt to ensure that an error like this is not repeated.

Letter
Kennedy, Seen From Paris
Published: December 22, 2008
Editors' Note Appended

As mayor of Paris, I find Caroline Kennedy’s bid for the seat of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton both surprising and not very democratic, to say the least. What title has Ms. Kennedy to pretend to Hillary Clinton’s seat? 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.

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.

We French have been consistently admiring of the American Constitution, but it seems that recently both Republicans and Democrats are drifting away from a truly democratic model. The Kennedy era is long gone, and I guess that New York has plenty of more qualified candidates to fill the shoes of Hillary Clinton. Can we speak of American decline?

Bertrand Delanoë
Paris, Dec.18, 2008

Editors' Note: December 22, 2008

Earlier this morning, we posted a letter that carried the name of Bertrand Delanoë, 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.

I supported TARP when it was being debated in September, and I still do — all the more so, since it has been transformed primarily into a mechanism for recapitalizing banks (temporarily) rather than buying illiquid assets (permanently). As a conservative and a libertarian, I am repelled by government intervention like this. But we don’t have the luxury to stand on principle. The reality is that our government holds itself out as a safety net for the banking system, and it is obliged to effectively act as such when needed. Especially after the series of disastrous interventions from mid-March to mid-September, from Bear Stearns to Wachovia, in which government ineptitude nearly destroyed the financial system (documented in my November 17 NR cover story “Deadly Rescues"), it is the duty of the Treasury, the Fed, and the FDIC to not only do what they are chartered to do, but to clean up after their own mess. Yes, there will be challenges ahead in weaning ourselves from the TARP teat. But if it had not been for the government involvement of TARP, I have no doubt that the lights of the world would have gone out by now — and they’d be very difficult to relight, and government would only be even more involved.

The New York Times suddenly discovered a study by Fed economist, Hui Shan, which they think reveals a new cause for the housing bubble. Shan's study found that a 1997 tax change allowing capital-gains-tax-free sales of homes (up to $500,000 of gains for couples and $250,000 for singles) increased housing sales. The Times concluded that this change might have contributed to the housing bubble by increasing the demand for owner-occupied housing...

But Hui Shan did not conclude that the 1997 law increased housing prices—only sales of houses that qualified for the gains exclusion—and the capital gains/bubble hypothesis rests on pretty shaky ground.

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:43 PM | link