When President Obama spoke at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio, on Wednesday, he said, "I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth." But when Fox News host Steve Doocy repeated it on Fox & Friends to Mitt Romney, it was a false version: "Unlike some people, I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth." Updated with correction.

The first three words, "unlike some people," are a complete fabrication. President Obama never said them or anything like them.  The difference is very significant, as it is much easier to interpret the fabricated quote as a deliberate mockery of Romney.

What happened next?  The Washington Post reported the story without noting Doocy's fabrication and put his words directly into the mouth of President Obama:

Even worse, the New York Post - a sister media outlet to Fox News - devoted one of its two Friday editorials to slamming Obama for taunting Romney -- based on the false quote:

When I pointed this out to Adam Brodsky on the editorial staff at the New York Post, he suggested that I should write a Letter to the Editor, but said he couldn't promise that it would actually be printed.  As of this writing, he had expressed no intention of correcting the fabricated quote, and it is still there.

Meanwhile, the false quote is reverberating in the echo chamber of the right-wing blogosphere:

You can read more of my comments on this here.

So, the upshot is that Fox News can put a completely false, fabricated quotation into the President's mouth, and two of the nation's largest, most powerful newspapers will pick it up and uncritically report it, without checking, as if it were the truth.

CORRECTION FROM ELLEN: The title of this post originally said The New York Times repeated Doocy's falsehood. This was an editing error, not the mistake of the author.