"Gawker," the "source for daily Manhattan media news and gossip," brings to our attention this correction from The New York Times. It’s a lulu, and boy, do they owe Mark Warner an apology.

Before I had seen that blog post or the correction, I had seen the magazine, and it had practically knocked me over with its apparently deliberate cosmetic assassination of the Virginia governor.

I saw it lying on a shelf behind the door — therefore in relative darkness — in the editorial conference room just before our morning meeting, and it drew me to it immediately with its incredibly vivid ugliness. I swear, before I picked it up, I thought it was a full-color, artfully painted caricature meant to represent some stereotype of the ultimate untrustworthy face. The shifty used car salesman type, or a blogger, or whatever.

I was shocked when I picked it up and saw it was not only meant to portray a real person, but was an actual photograph — albeit a brutally unrealistic Photoshopped distortion of the original. Color, brightness, contrast and proportion were all extremely unrealistic looking. (Of course, I suppose proportion would have been distorted when the picture was taken, via lens selection.)

It just made you think, What do the photo editors of this magazine have against this man? This is not what he looks like. Are they trying to kill his presidential chances before he gets started?

My colleague Mike Fitts remarked that Mr. Warner wasn’t going to win "Hillary’s state" anyway. But you know, the NYT is read far beyond that.

Now, for those who had trouble following the links, here is what the correction said in the Times:

The cover photograph in The Times Magazine on Sunday rendered colors incorrectly for the jacket, shirt and tie worn by Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor who is a possible candidate for the presidency. The jacket was charcoal, not maroon; the shirt was light blue, not pink; the tie was dark blue with stripes, not maroon.

The Times’s policy rules out alteration of photographs that depict actual news scenes and, even in a contrived illustration, requires acknowledgment in a credit. In this case, the film that was used can cause colors to shift, and the processing altered them further; the change escaped notice because of a misunderstanding by the editors.

Film? What kind of film? Infrared? I mean, the man’s teeth glowed in the dark. They were all I saw when I first glanced at it.

Gawker, which appropriately named this the "Correction of the Week," added this further observation:

Also, Warner’s teeth have not been capped and whitened, his lower lip isn’t doing that weird thing, and he doesn’t actually give off that smarmy politician vibe that made you turn over the magazine on your coffee table so you didn’t have to keep looking at him. It’s all just a misunderstanding.

I’m sure the Times would have said that, too, if they’d had a little more room. Aren’t you?