Misspelling Blagojevich Week: 6th & 7th Circles of Hell

Due to technical difficulties (read: real work), Misspelling Blagojevich Week was offline yesterday, but it's back in full force today, with a double entry or the sixth and seventh circles of hell, as it's become for the Proofreader. The onslaught of Blagojevich blunders continues with mistakes made at professional blogs The Huffington Post and The Daily Kos. Politics is supposed to be the specialty of these two online pubs, but that doesn't give them immunity to this mistake that's been made far and wide, by big and small, by print and online publications, by left-wing and right-wing.

The above screen shot of a December 18 post titled "We Need a Good Obama Speech. Now." features a Blagojevich bungling in the first line of the third paragraph, as you can see highlighted above. Perhaps "We Need a Good Proofreader. Now." would have been a more apropos title for this post.

Below, The Daily Kos misspelled Blagojevich in the headline of an article lengthily titled, "If we can put Blogojevich aside for a moment, how is Obama doing?" as you can see highlighted in the screen shot. Who is Blogojevich anyway? All the news sources that have made and will make this mistake are really just making up news, because, technically, no one by the name of "Blogojevich" exists. Or at least no one that's been governor of Illinois.

"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.

Huffington, Times Tag-Team Mistake

2010 splits the defenders

News outlets love to break news so much that sometimes they bungle the story a little (and sometimes a lot). In the scramble to be the town crier on a big T.V. news story involving Jay Leno staying on at NBC in prime time after he leaves the Tonight show, at least two major news organizations made a small but critical mistake.

Shockingly, on its Web site, The New York Times printed a glaring (to sharp-eyed readers) error in its coverage of the Leno story. As you can see in the screen shot highlighted above, The Times’ article states, “Five years ago NBC announced that it would give the job of host of that franchise late-night show to Conan O'Brien in May 2010.”

Any follower of this story knows that Mr. O’Brien is taking over the Tonight show from the large-jawed host in May 2009 (not 2010) and so does The Times, because the paper has been closely following the story for around five years and the article’s writer basically wrote the book on late night television (a truly amazing story and good read). Therefore, it’s no surprise The Times quickly recognized and corrected the error, albeit without admitting to the gaffe.

But, lesser news organizations, most notably The Huffington Post, have made the mistake and, as of this writing, have yet to make the correction. It’s one thing for The Times to publish a typo or briefly get the years in question mixed up while breaking the story, but it’s quite another blunder for Huffington Post editors to reprint the story and not catch the error. And, The Huffington Post didn’t clearly credit the story to The Times. Huh, really?

Yep, look closely at the above screen shot. Huffington Post editors gave their own writer credit for the story and the mistake while vaguely noting that The Times "also reports the move," even though the majority of the text is copied verbatim from The Times. The Proofreader can’t help but wonder if Huffington Post editors read the story or just performed some slapdash copying and pasting to get the story online as quickly as possible. As is often the case, other media outlets have repeated the mistake, but many, if not most, have not. Hopefully, those that did will correct the mistake and notify readers of the original error.