French Letter Has Times in a Spin

It seemed at first like a cri de coeur for the apparent decline of meritocracy ? or yet another round in the Franco-American debate about which society laid the foundations of modern democracy.

But the letter from the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delano?, weighing in on Caroline Kennedy's campaign to win selection for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat in an unusually intemperate language at the very least seemed genuine ? at least to the letters page editors at the New York Times.

"I find Caroline Kennedy's bid for the seat of senator Hillary Rodham Clinton both surprising and not very democratic, to say the least," the letter began. "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."

The letter went on to accuse Kennedy of acting in "very poor taste" before concluding: "It seems that recently both Republicans and Democrats are drifting away from a truly democratic model ? Can we speak of American decline?"

By midday New York time the letter was causing consternation on both sides of the Atlantic. Greta Van Susteren, a Fox television anchor, blogged on the letter, headlining the post "Sticking his nose in our business".

The item attracted more than 180 comments ? most of them siding with the argument that Kennedy did not deserve to be a senator.

In Paris, the mayor's office spent the morning trying to figure out where the letter came from, according to a French blogger.

Soon, however, the New York Times posted a notice on its website admitting that the diatribe from Delano? was a fake. "It should not have been published," the notice said.

It said the New York Times had sent an edited version of the letter to the mayor's office by email, but received no response. The staff then failed to follow the paper's policy of contacting the mayor to verify that he had indeed written the letter.

By yesterday afternoon, it was still unclear who had.