A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY:

Grumbling and slamming the phone on a reporter – it just didn’t sound like Bill Gardner, New Hampshire’s secretary of state. But that’s how it seemed in Sunday’s New York Times, in an article about the Democratic Party’s plan to move Nevada ahead of New Hampshire in the presidential nominating calendar.

Adam Nagourney, the top political reporter for the Times, included this sentence in a paragraph about Gardner’s potential to buck the Democratic plan and enforce New Hampshire law:

“Reached at home on Saturday to see what he might do, Mr. Gardner responded, ‘do not call me here,’and hung up the telephone.”

The problem was, New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner hadn’t spoken to Nagourney since 2004. The man the reporter called was an unrelated William Gardner, who apparently lives in Rochester.

Hey, the NYT can’t even tell the Contras from the Sandinistas. . . .

UPDATE: But hey, no reason to single out the Times:

Daniel Schorr is used to producers popping into his Washington, D.C., office at National Public Radio to ask, on deadline: Which war came first, Korea or Vietnam?

Jeez. What do they teach them in school these days?