Even the best newspaper reporters make mistakes. Here’s an unfortunately funny correction about the My Little Pony character a young woman thinks about to cheer herself up. Another correction from the Centralia Morning Sentinel notes that a member of a Christian rock band was on, um, drums, not drugs. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Newspaper Mistakes”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Back when I was a news reporter, all of us in the newsroom lived in utter dread of making a mistake.
Yes, I remember it.
It was awful. You’d have to write out a correction that starts due to a reporter’s error, and that would be published the next day.
Get it approved by the editor, that slow walk to the office where you’re like, I did it again.
That’s right, the perp walk. It was awful.
But Grant, I don’t know if you have this experience.
The farther I get away from daily newspapering, the more I sort of enjoy reading the corrections.
Yes, yes.
You know, you do it with a sort of mix of schadenfreude and survivor’s guilt.
You know, there’s not your error.
And, of course, the one that got the most attention recently was the one that ran in the New York Times.
I’m sure you saw this one.
It actually said,
An article on Monday about Jack Robison and Kirsten Linsmith, two college students with Asperger syndrome who are navigating the perils of an intimate relationship,
Misidentified the character from the animated children’s TV show My Little Pony that Ms. Linsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up.
It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.
That ran in the New York Times.
They got a My Little Pony wrong.
And there was another one.
I know.
In the L.A. Times.
I know, I know.
Also about the ponies.
It was epic.
I have to share my favorite with you.
I think this has made the rounds, but it deserves to be shared.
This is a real one from last year from the Centralia Morning Sentinel.
It’s about a man in a Christian rock band, and that’s important.
Okay.
It says, due to a typing error, Saturday’s story on local artist John Henninger
Mistakenly reported that Henninger’s bandmate Eric Lide was on drugs.
The story should have read that Lide was on drums.
The Sentinel regrets the error.
I’m sorry!
What do you do when you’re that reporter, right?
I mean, was it just…
You want to blame autocorrect, but really,
How many times do you make an autocorrect mistake
Before you just turn off autocorrect, right?
That is awful!
I know Jay Leno shares these on his show,
But if you’ve got some you think we should see,
We’d love to have them.
Send them an email to words@waywordradio.org
Or post them on our Facebook page.
