Mea Culpa Monday: The cat got their tongue edition

Never say copy editors don’t have a sense of humor. They’re so funny that one editor has been fired and another suspended after a joke in California’s North County Times went haywire.

The two editors altered one word in an AP story about a city hall plea to tighten pet neutering laws, assuming that the change would be caught, corrected pre-press, and hilarity would ensue. But the changes were never caught, the tweaked story went to print, and the real hilarity ensued.

So please understand that the line should read:

“'We will, sooner rather than later, become a no-kill city and this is the greatest step in that direction,’ Councilman Tony Cardenas, who co-authored the bill, said as he held a kitten at a City Hall news conference.

Not, as they printed, “Tony Cadenas…said as he strangled a kitten.”

Bonus White House mea culpa: “We’re sorry our liaison to Christian groups moonlights as a faith-based plagiarist for a Texas newspaper. And we’re especially sorry he plagiarized the Pope.” - Fort Wayne News-Sentinel and Nancynall.com