Here's an intriguing editorial from the desk of Byron Calame, Public Editor, NY Times.

A PERFUME critic? Yes, The Times now has one. Chandler Burr’s Scent Strip column appears in the high-gloss T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where the often-fluffy lifestyle coverage is a world apart from the kind of journalism in the daily sections of the paper.

No; wait! Really — it gets interesting later on. Here, all I can say is "kudoes" to the Times for coming up with a magazine name that can be readily handled by the average New York Style Magazine-type reader: "T." If you can't grasp THAT name, then, by golly, maybe it's time to get out of the magazine-reading business altogether.

T: Style’s perfume critic — like the advertising-driven concept for the glossy new real estate magazine — is part of The Times’s calculated effort to create new content and publications that will attract additional advertisers.

Hold on; that's only paragraph two. For those of you not driven away yet, we'll have to wait awhile for the Retraction... lemme press the fast-forward button:

Ah. Paragraph 16:

Since the job of public editor requires me to probe and question the published work and wisdom of Times journalists, there’s a special responsibility for me to acknowledge my own flawed assessments.

My July 2 column strongly supported The Times’s decision to publish its June 23 article on a once-secret banking-data surveillance program. After pondering for several months, I have decided I was off base. There were reasons to publish the controversial article, but they were slightly outweighed by two factors to which I gave too little emphasis. While it’s a close call now, as it was then, I don’t think the article should have been published.

[emphasis mine, and italics mine as well. "slightly" = oh-so-close!]

Those two factors are really what bring me to this corrective commentary: the apparent legality of the program in the United States, and the absence of any evidence that anyone’s private data had actually been misused.

Well; whaddya know about that? I'm sure this will be big news among those cognoscenti interested in perfume critics! Let's continue... paragraphs 20-21:

I haven’t found any evidence in the intervening months that the surveillance program was illegal under United States laws. Although data-protection authorities in Europe have complained that the formerly secret program violated their rules on privacy, there have been no Times reports of legal action being taken. Data-protection rules are often stricter in Europe than in America, and have been a frequent source of friction.

Also, there still haven’t been any abuses of private data linked to the program, which apparently has continued to function. That, plus the legality issue, has left me wondering what harm actually was avoided when The Times and two other newspapers disclosed the program.

Oh, well — no harm, no foul. But, just for form's sake, can we somehow lay this little slip-up at the president's doorstep?

My original support for the article rested heavily on the fact that so many people already knew about the program that serious terrorists also must have been aware of it. But critical, and clever, readers were quick to point to a contradiction: the Times article and headline had both emphasized that a “secret” program was being exposed. (If one sentence down in the article had acknowledged that a number of people were probably aware of the program, both the newsroom and I would have been better able to address that wave of criticism.)

What kept me from seeing these matters more clearly earlier in what admittedly was a close call? I fear I allowed the vicious criticism of The Times by the Bush administration to trigger my instinctive affinity for the underdog and enduring faith in a free press...

Ye-he-heSSSSS!! Bush goes down again!!

This November's gonna be one long party for the Democratics.