Media malfunction

It's a good thing those mainstream media types have fact checkers and all, otherwise they'd totally screw up a quote from one Mark Steyn........

As Times reporters James C. McKinley Jr. and Sam Dillon wrote: “Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and political commentator, speaking on the Rush Limbaugh show on Wednesday, accused Mr. Obama of trying to create a cult of personality, comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader.”

So of course, since the NY Times didn't fact check it, every other media outlet simply parroted this misstatement (read all the allegedly credible news sources here)

So what did Steyn actually say about the Obama cult of personality?

Oh, dear! “A Canadian author”: Talk about damning with faint credentialization. I don’t know what’s crueler, the “Canadian” or the indefinite article. As to the rest of it, well, that’s one way of putting it. Here’s what I said on Wednesday re dear old Saddam and Kim: “Obviously we’re not talking about the cult of personality on the Saddam Hussein/Kim Jong-Il scale.”

Big difference eh?

But it really explains why a lie from the Times spreads like a R2D2 virus across the traditional news organism.