Forgive me for quoting myself, but Mark reminds me of something I wrote once, and of a point a lot of us keep having to make. In 2004, I did a piece for NR called “Going Timesless.” (Had to do with how people were, increasingly, giving up the Times.) I said,

The Times is still the essential news habit of much of elite America (pardon the term). And, of course, this paper affects all of America’s media, whether individual Americans know it or not. “No one here in Duluth reads the New York Times,” I sometimes hear, “so why should I pay attention? Aren’t some of you guys obsessed?” But what our Minnesotan fails to appreciate is that everyone who supplies him his news — whether in print or over the air — does read the Times. And is profoundly influenced by it. The paper is in the bloodstream of this nation’s media.

Which can be very unfortunate, especially when the Times is slandering — sorry, libeling — Mark Steyn. And it must be especially annoying to Mark that the Times said he said the opposite of what he said. As a character on Saturday Night Live used to say — this was back, eons ago, when I was watching it (and also reading the Times) — “I hate when that happens.”

P.S. We might update an old saying: “A Times report goes halfway around the world before the truth has time to pull its boots on.” Or is that all the way around the world?

P.P.S. Wonder whether the Grey Lady will run a correction — or some kind of clarification or something super-finely nuanced.

P.P.P.S. You know what ought to go in Bartlett’s? “A significant percentage of American newspapering is little more than provincial wannabes doing New York Times karaoke.”