“We Regret the Error”

“’Bear sighting: An item in the National Briefing in Sunday’s Section A said a bear wandered into a grocery store in Hayward, Wis., on Friday and headed for the beer cooler. It was Thursday.’ Like a chef who becomes bored with steak and potatoes and begins seeking out the strange and sublime, my taste in media errors and corrections is beginning to veer towards the edges. This became clear as I undertook my annual ritual of reviewing a year’s worth of media errors and corrections published on my Web site, in order to select the best of the worst. My annual Year in Media Errors and Corrections and Plagiarism Round-Up went live on Wednesday. The errors post is over 6,000 words long, and features some of the mistakes and issues I’ve covered in this column over the past twelve months. For example, the Correction of the Year was the Washington Post correction that launched a thousand tweets. The Error of the Year was the Wafergate scandal and apologies, and the Trend of the Year was fact checking, which I previously called ‘one of the great American pastimes of the Internet age.’”