Accuracy in journalism is important and John should be commended for immediately correcting his error:

I’m sorry I called Kristin Davis a hooker
I apologize for calling gubernatorial candidate Kristin Davis a hooker in a column published in this paper on Tuesday. I offer this apology for calling Kristin Davis a hooker, after receiving an e-mailed press release declaring her intention to sue me for calling her a hooker.
She is not, the press release explains, a hooker. Nor has she ever been a hooker — or at least, according to the press release, “there is no evidence whatsoever” that Davis was a hooker.
In the press release, her lawyer says, “Mr. Podhoretz cannot make irresponsible statements like calling my client a hooker.”
I am sorry if I made an irresponsible statement calling Kristin Davis a hooker. I had wrongly assumed that the hooker business was like any other business in which ambitious go-getters with spunk rose through its ranks from rough-and-tumble frontline work to the more genteel managerial responsibilities that go with the hotly desired executive title of “madam.”
Since I am willing to acknowledge I don’t know enough about what goes into making someone a hooker, I was wrong to call Kristin Davis a hooker.
I was wrong to assume that, just because she (in the words of her own press release) “spent four months on Rikers Island after pleading to one count of promoting prostitution,” Kristin Davis herself could be described as a hooker. No, and no again — Kristin Davis was an employer of hookers, a contractor of hookers.
She interposed herself between clients like Eliot Spitzer and contractors like Ashley Dupre, but in so interposing, she participated only in the sense that she made money off the hooker.

The rest of probably the funniest correction ever here.