The New York Times — the Paper of Record — failed to live up to its reputation once again if Friday’s edition was any evidence. The Grey Lady has striven to provide the best political reporting this year but continues to get trounced by the Washington Post on a near daily basis. It’s not hard to see why.

On Friday in particular, the Times must have been suffering from a little dementia…it seems they conveniently forgot they were at a debate sponsored by FOX News Channel, omitting the network from the story entirely, and deciding that Brit Hume, Chris Wallace, Carl Cameron and Wendell Goler were simply “moderators” in the photo caption which accompanied the story, and didn’t need to be identified with FOX News Channel or have their actual names mentioned. Meanwhile, major papers like the Washington Post and USA Today credited the network in their stories.

As one wag told us, “That’s equivalent to FOX identifying a New York Times writer on the air as a ‘reporter’ and not mentioning their name or what paper they’re associated with…which would never happen since it’s downright unprofessional.”

Turns out the Times saw what a colossal error they had made and quickly ran a correction, but the photo omission went unacknowledged. Big Head DC hears that the editors felt they had enough egg on their faces with the one correction and didn’t want to draw more attention to their mistakes with another. One Times insider told us, “We looked like complete jackasses for this and the copy/photo editors involved knew they screwed up royally so they weren’t looking to be under any more of a microscope on this one, but at the end of the day, Michael Cooper and Michael Luo’s names are on the story, so they’re the ones most embarrassed here.”

The incident had many in the Beltway and on the campaign trail scratching their heads over what can either be seen as pure sloppiness or complete bias of behalf of the New York Times. Either way, the paper of Record doesn’t look quite so “fit to print” at the moment.