January 5, 2009 – 8:00 am
Defamer (via LAist) took note of the fact that a pre-written obit for Lena Horne went live on Entertainment Weekly’s website back in December:
A similar thing happened at CNN.com a few years back, except that was an example of mass obiticide.
December 19, 2008 – 10:44 pm
Message: On 21 November we published an article headed “Nominet chairman embroiled in governance row: sits on own salary committee”. Contrary to that article, we wish to make it clear that Mr Gilbert, the chairman of Nominet, does not sit on a committee which determines his remuneration. We apologise to Mr Gilbert for any embarrassment [...]
December 15, 2008 – 8:00 am
In the Dec. 8 “Technology,” Farhad Manjoo originally criticized SnapTell’s iPhone application for failing to recognize products like a bag of Cheez-Its and a bottle of Arm & Hammer laundry detergent. The SnapTell application is designed to identify only books, CDs, DVDs, and video games. Link
December 11, 2008 – 8:00 am
On December 4, CNN.com featured a photo showing an image of Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic surrounded by pre-election posters showing Serbian Progressive Party President Tomislav Nikolic in Belgrade. We cropped the image to show only Nikolic, but a caption referencing the police’s ongoing hunt for Mladic misleadingly implied this was Mladic.
CNN apologises [...]
December 4, 2008 – 9:27 pm
A report from the Globe And Mail (Sportsnet is a Canadian sports channel and website):
Rogers Sportsnet has pulled NFL commentator Chris Landry off the air and removed his column from Sportsnet.ca following an allegation of plagiarism.
Some of Landry’s columns on Sportsnet.ca have contained word for word passages from Internet pieces written by Mike Lombardi and [...]
December 3, 2008 – 8:00 am
Poynter’s Amy Gahran has an interesting post up about a false report from the Press Association that moved its way around the web:
On Nov. 29, the story ran in Wales Online: “We thought we were safe… then CNN stepped in!” said the headline. As of this writing you can still find it listed in the [...]
November 26, 2008 – 8:00 am
Last week, The Onion mislabeled a photo of an Apache trout as a rainbow trout. Happy, Vince from Wyoming? (This was on the site’s homepage.)
Thanks, Dave!
November 13, 2008 – 8:00 am
A man posing as a McCain campaign advisor managed to convince several media outlets to take him seriously. In the end, he’s a filmmaker looking for publicity. Take it away, New York Times:
It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not [...]
October 31, 2008 – 11:20 am
An earlier version of this story conflated two non-existent audio tapes of Michelle Obama. Link
Thanks, David!
October 13, 2008 – 8:00 am
In today’s Times, Noam Cohen looks at how fake news ends up being reported as true:
IN 1864, back when rumor still traveled by foot, a young messenger walked into the newsrooms of New York City’s press row with an Associated Press bulletin that President Lincoln had ordered the conscription of 400,000 additional troops for the [...]
October 6, 2008 – 8:00 am
In the Sept. 29 “Science,” Daniel Engber described a scene in Californication in which David Duchovny’s character performs cunnilingus on an underage girl whom he’d taken to be his wife. The girl’s exact age was never stated, and he mistook her for his girlfriend. Link
September 29, 2008 – 8:00 am
Due to a copy-editing error, the Sept. 16 “Ad Report Card” misquoted a line from the trailer for Zack and Miri Make a Porno. In the trailer, Rogen’s character says he would like to watch “a tape of Rosie O’Donnell getting fucked stupid.” Link
September 26, 2008 – 2:13 pm
In a story that appeared on Global and on the Internet at globalnational.com and canada.com in 2006 regarding the Tim Hortons location in Afghanistan, we reported that Tim Hortons received a subsidy from the federal government to open the outlet on the military base in Kandahar.
The circumstances were that the Canadian military approached Tim Hortons [...]
September 22, 2008 – 8:00 am
In the Sept. 16 “Music Box,” Jody Rosen originally misspelled the name of Nicolas Sarkozy as Nicholas Sarkozy. The article also makes a playful, sarcastic reference to Sarkozy being “13 years older and 13 inches shorter than his new wife.” According to their published heights, Sarkozy is 10.16 centimeters shorter than Carla Bruni. Link
August 20, 2008 – 8:00 am
A story published Aug. 7 about a class-action lawsuit against Selwyn House originally said Quebec Judge Pierre Gagnon recommended raising a cap on a proposed compensation package to $20 million from $5 million. Gagnon did not make that recommendation in his judgment. The CBC regrets the inaccuracy. Link
August 18, 2008 – 8:00 am
In the Aug. 14 “Green Room,” Etienne Benson mistakenly described a snow leopard as prowling “through the jungle.” Snow leopards do not live in jungles. Link
August 14, 2008 – 8:00 am
A correction to a blog post (”Things you might not know about Barack Obama”) on the Rocky Mountain News’ website:
One of the items on this list has been removed because it mistakenly repeated a report that Barack Obama holds dual United States-Kenyan citizenship. This erroneous information was never reported in the Rocky Mountain News print [...]
August 13, 2008 – 8:00 am
On Aug. 9, the Bottom Line at ESPN incorrectly reported that WFAA-TV in Dallas mistakenly had reported that school administrators in Dallas had changed the grades of former University of Kansas player Darrell Arthur’s grades to keep him eligible to play basketball while in high school. WFAA made no such mistake. Instead, it reported the [...]
A ForbesTraveler.com story published in February referred to the Web site beijingticketing.com as a ticket resource for travelers visiting Beijing for the 2008 Summer Olympics. The International Olympic Committee and the U.S. Olympic Committee have since filed a lawsuit against beijingticketing.com and other ticket-selling Web sites, claiming they were deceitful. In a statement, the USOC [...]
In the July 30 “Moneybox,” Daniel Gross included a significant numerical error. The piece linked to a Bureau of Transportation Statistics report, which can be seen here, that shows public construction spending on roads and highways in monthly totals. That Census Bureau reports the data as monthly totals expressed at an annualized rate. Because we [...]
In an early version of the Today’s Headlines e-mail for Sunday, a photograph of Johnny Carson was incorrectly paired with an Op-Ed article about Radovan Karadzic. Link
For many years, the Mainichi Daily News, the English website of Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, was the place to go if you wanted to read salacious articles about the sexual habits of the Japanese. The stories, which were featured in the site’s “WaiWai” column, frequently stretched believability. Here’s a list of stories published on its [...]
A story published June 30 about a forest fire hitting two remote communities in northern Saskatchewan said the Stony Mountain federal penitentiary was evacuated. In fact, the penitentiary is in Manitoba, is not near the fire-affected areas and was not evacuated. Link
The American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site has a standard practice of using the word “homosexual”* instead of “gay” when it comes to, well, gay people. They even set up a filter to automatically make the change.
As has been noted by sites such as Boing Boing and PageOneQ, among others, this practice didn’t serve ONN well [...]
