"Governor" Problem For Huffington, MSNBC and AOL

A few days ago, a local T.V. station in Chicago had a problem spelling the word "governor" on its Web site. Turns out, CBS2 didn't break any ground with the gaffe. The Huffington Post, MSNBC and AOL have all misspelled the word in the past.

In a blog post dated July 9, 2007, the word appeared spelled incorrectly on The Huffington Post, as you can see, highlighted in a screen shot of an excerpt below. In the second-to-last line of the article's eighth paragraph, sharp-eyed readers will note the word is spelled "Govenror," evidently a typo that eluded copy editors.

A couple months later, headline writers at MSNBC.com had issues with the word, misspelling it in the deck of an A.P. article dated September 20, 2007. Just under the headline, highlighted in the screen shot below, the word is spelled "govenror." Below that, writers got the word right in a caption.


About eleven months after that, the same mistake was made in a news story on AOL.in. If you adjust your view to the last line of the fourth paragraph in the screen shot below, you should see the blunder staring you in the face, highlighted of course.

The news story is credited to Indo Asian News Services, a sort of A.P. of the Eastern world. While the wire service seems to write copy with a British affect, "Govenror" is still not an accepted spelling of the word. And, not only did the IANS copy editors miss the copy mistake, but so did the editors at AOL India. Most definitely mistakes that shouldn't have been made and still haven't been corrected, despite ample time to do so.