Sadly, Google users finding out-of-date Tribune stories nearly did. An old, no longer remotely correct report of United Airline's demise caused a sell off on Wall Street. Oops! This much is true – today Bloomberg cited a web-bas

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin saved a Russian camera crew from a Siberian tiger attack yesterday. Sorta makes up for killing that dissident journalist the day before.

Russia is a scary place. Two days ago, Magomed Yevloyev, owner of a news site critical of Russia’s handling of the Ingushetiya region, was fatally shot in the temple while detained by police. The police have confirmed that the proprietor of&nb

As a display of national unity, China marched out children from its 56 ethnic groups as part of the increasingly fabricated opening ceremonies. Surprise! The children were all from the Han majority (90% of the population). To be fair, replacing all the et

The Olympics are on! And if you saw the opening ceremonies on TV, well, no you didn’t. The fireworks were digitally added and Viewers weren’t warned. Which makes sense, it all happened without NBC’s knowledge. China’s high-conc

A high-five to Glen Mabie out in Eau Claire, who has won the Society of Professional Journalists Ethics in Journalism Award. It’s a great honor – and one that’s going to someone no longer in the industry. Mabie won the award for resignin

If you have heard about this Barack Obama fellow, it might be because the news talks about him a whole lot. National network news gave him 166 minutes of coverage in the first seven weeks after the primary, more than double John McCain’s 67 minutes.

If you thought that the New Yorker Obama cover was offensive, well, you sure didn’t show it. The magazine is having trouble keeping up with the demand for issues with the controversial cover. The New York Post reports that the typical 43,000 newssta

If you have never heard of Mainichi Shimbun, you are (a) unaware that the Japanese Newspaper is the fourth largest in the world and (b) not a big fan of stories about odd Japanese sex practices. The English site, called the Mainichi Daily News, was until

I write this at my own peril. I plan on flying out to Boston in August to visit my family. The Transportation Security Agency has put CNN reporter Drew Griffin on the terrorist watch list. Why him and not, say, the more sinister sounding Wolf Blitzer? We

Those paying particularly close attention to the sports news of the past week might have noticed one Brett Favre attempting to come out of retirement. It has been bad news for most people involved. To Brett’s dismay, the Packers want to move forward

What's more iffy than a major web site editing the historical record by "unpublishing" all the posts that refer to their one-time friend? Me, using this blog to link to my Columbia Journalism Review story about it.

It’s the Forth of July, and in honor of that great American tradition – the National Pastime – here’s a clip of Fox’s Baseball announcer Joe Buck saying he hates baseball. Buck_0001by bsap11   Enjoy your Independence Day.        

To say that the suicide of model Ruslana Korshunova has been sensationalized might be an understatement. Like soldiers on the battlefield, the model was given a posthumous field promotion to “supermodel” by many headlines. But while upping Kor

Pretend for a moment that you don't remember Don Imus calling the Rutgers women's basketball team a bunch of "nappy headed hoes." Pretend he didn't tell 60 Minutes that he hired a producer to make "nigger jokes." Pretend you don't know who he is. Liste

Every week or so, bloggers very publicly complain that they aren't being taken seriously. Usually it's because they aren't.  Legally, blogs don't receive the same protections. Professionally, agencies don't provide even the most prominent of websites

Tim Russert has died of unknown causes. He was the political reporter that every reporter wanted to be. There was no reporter with a broader base of knowledge; no television moderator with a better grasp on when a guest was lying, contradicting himself, o

Mea culpa Monday’s sibling, Tua culpa Tuesday tracks the best accusation of the media that doesn’t result in a correction. Who is the most not JT LeRoy? The JT LeRoy saga was a high-brow version of the James Frey scandal. Both unfolded withi

Ted Stefaniak and John Burton, sportscasters for Green Bay’s WGBA, were laid off after Journal Communications consolidated Green Bay’s athletics coverage to WTMJ, Milwaukee. Journal Communications, owners of the Journal-Sentinel, are smart peo

When presidential hopeful Barack Obama told Oregon, “We can’t…eat as much as we want…anymore,” most rational people understood it as a consequence of energy conservation. After all, it was in the easy-to-understand context

Mea Culpa Mondays was started as a weekly feature to track the most interesting media apologies. It dates back to the first, now defunct, Shepherd Express website – the original posts are lost to the internet and confined on my hard drive. So trust me when I say that this is the first time in the Mea Culpa history with two consecutive Tua Culpa Tuesdays. Now more than ever before, other people are at fault.

This lession was taken to the logical extreme by Memphis Flyer editor Bruce VanWyngarden, NBC News and the president last week when each found ways to turn being accused of blame into being the victim.

For no one could becoming a victim be more complicated than Bruce VanWyngarden. After a Monday television report, the entire city of Memphis took offense to columnist John Branston's use of  “HNIC” to discuss the search for a new school principal. Coined by Joe Clark, the principal immortalized in Lean on Me, the unique term is the most ethnically colorful way of acronyming the “Highest [black dude] In Charge.”

Like policing the school baseball bat in hand or chaining student’s to desks, HNIC was a part of Clark’s no-nonsense, lawman persona. So when the mayor referred to the need for a Joe Clark like principal, Branston figured the new recruit would enjoy Clark’s nickname. Naturally.

“I apologize to those who were offended by the use of the term in John's column,” VanWyngarden wrote in an online editor’s note. “It was not intended as a racial slur but as a cultural reference to a very real and important decision facing our school board.”

“Thanks primarily to a rather sensationalistic story on WREG Channel 3, John Branston's City Beat column from this week's Flyer seems to be generating some controversy,” it began. “…Whether that was an error in judgment or insensitive is open to debate.”

To be fair, WREG is notorious for sensationalizing the entire NIC system of taxonomy. They even complained about the Lowest NIC.

Usually death is, at best, a metaphor for media error. Like last week’s functional death of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty after famed photo retoucher Pascal Dangin refered to his work on the “lumpier-than-usual” models a “g

If you (like me) read Jason Whitlock’s column about his experience writing a cover story for Playboy, you’d have the sense that the magazine chose an irrelevant, race-baiting headline to make a story about the cultural costs of prisons sexier.

A quick follow-up to a post from last week. Jason Whitlock’s was upset about Playboy’s decision to give his cover story about the American penal system the offensive and offensively-irrelevant “The Black KKK: Hip Hop is killing Black Ame

For the second year in a row, one of the winners of the Washington Post’s contest for child poets has been outed as a plagiarist. Credit the poem “Horrible. Just Horrible,” printed in the “KidsPost,” to Shel Silverstein. Ombu