Recognize this paragraph?

Mr. Fitzgerald has been focused on whether there was an illegal effort at the White House to undermine the credibility of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who became a critic of the administration’s Iraq policy by his dismissive comments over the possibility that Baghdad had sought to buy uranium fuel from Niger.

It’s in the New York Times today, but it’s also been in every AP, Reuters, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN story about special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into who leaked the name of Joseph Wilson’s wife to the media in 2003. It is the obligatory Joseph-Wilson background paragraph, and you’ll never see a correction even though it gets a fact wrong.

In his famous op-ed of July 6, 2003, Joseph Wilson did not make “dismissive comments over the possibility that Baghdad had sought to buy uranium fuel from Niger.” He dismissed the possibility that Baghdad had actually purchased uranium from Niger.

Wilson wrote that he had been sent to Niger to check out whether Saddam had actually purchased uranium, and that “It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.”

As the liberal media critic Bob Somerby has pointed out over and over again:

We