12.14.06
Sometimes the press just effs up
This singular tribute to Britain’s monarch is a Reuters dispatch celebrated on Regret the Error, a jovial blog devoted to news bloopers and their corrections. (If the text of the picture is too small for you to read, click here for a slightly larger version.)
Yesterday Regret the Error issued its annual best-of-the-year awards for 2006, which includes another Reuters howler about a recall of “beef panties,” which made its way uncorrected onto the New York Times web site as well as several other places where the copy editors slept at the helm.
Now the usual defense offered by journalists caught red-faced is “Given the amount of complex news we must report every day, it’s amazing that we don’t make more mistakes.” Actually it’s even more astonishing that they make the ones they do.
How could the Ottawa Citizen possibly have reported that “the Sabres outshit the Senators 32-28″? That should have transfixed the most somnolent editor.
My favorite of Regret the Error’s citations comes from the Orange County (Calif.) Register:
“Cannabis is a synonym for marijuana. Because of a reporter’s error, the word was misspelled in an article on Page 15 of the News section in the Sept. 22 edition of the Register.”
“As with many corrections,” Regret the Error points out, “it’s all about what they’re not telling you. Here’s the original, offending sentence:
“The pot growers had tapped into an irrigation line for landscaping around the gated community of Stoneridge, and had rigged up a network of white, 3/4-inch PVC piping to grow the cannibals.”
