Media mistakes and mishaps for 2008

Photos

correction-Photo-01

see larger image

uploaded by mike_yvr

Media screw ups in 2008 have provided a bountiful harvest for Craig Silverman's annual The Year in Media Errors and Corrections published on his website regrettheerror.com.

Silverman has assembled a jaw-dropping list of typos, plagiaristic practices, and examples of utter carelessness that have infected publications big and small over the past year.

National Public Radio's On the Media interviewed Silverman about his 2008 list last week and it's an entertaining, if somewhat frightening, piece.

Here are some of the real gems:

• There's the right-leaning on-line U.S. news site that as a matter of style, would replace (using an automatic filter) the word "gay" with "homosexual" in all its copy -- even sports copy that they ran from wire services. Of course, when this unforgiving filter processed a wire story about Tyson Gay's performance at the U.S. track and field Olympic trials, the results were predictable.
• Or how about the Vancouver sports broadcaster Dave Pratt who plagiarized the work of a high profile U.S. sports reporter for his column in The Province newspaper? When asked why he did it, Pratt responded that "It was Saturday and I wanted to get out by noon."
• Then there's the Vermont/New Hampshire newspaper, The Valley News, that managed to spell its own name wrong on front page.

This list goes on. Have a read.