Correction Appended

As 2012 draws to a close, the media’s “best of the year” roundups spread like kudzu. Top ten (or fifty, or hundred) lists offer journalists a chance to pat themselves on the back, but self-congratulation is in store for overserious readers as well. Who doesn’t like to pretend she read every word of the New York Times expose on corruption in China, or cried real tears at the inspirational National Journal tale of former presidents interacting with the author’s autistic son? Sometimes the worst is more interesting than the best, however. End-of-the-year rundowns of the media’s own gaffes offer a form of pleasure – schadenfreude – which is often much more enjoyable and genuine, if also more cynical, than appreciation. They also happen to be lot more light-hearted. There are lists of serious screw-ups, to be sure — CNN’s “oops” moment on the Supreme Court decision tops numerous listicles, and the “unskewed polls” guy surely warrants mention — but the smaller errors are just as entertaining.

Reuters media blogger Jack Shafer has no stomach for year-in-review packages in general. They certainly do seem to breed like rabbits; you’ll find everything from Businessweek’s “Worst CEOs of 2012” to Time’s super-comprehensive “Top Ten Everything of 2012,” which offers up 55 separate click-bait slideshows, on minutiae ranging from “Apologies” to “Marriage Stories.” (While visions of page-views danced in their heads . . . .) Shafer’s assessment is cutting but spot-on:

From their lazy fingers to your scratchy eyeballs, journalists are now transmitting their “year in review” articles and “best of 2012″ . . . . All the writer need do is drop it in the copy bank by the second week of December, pour himself an eggnog, and go Christmas shopping. The writer need not return any sooner than the first week of the new year. If real news breaks out in the interval, his editors can always run wire copy.

So am I going to let that deter me from supplying my own “Best Of” tally? Of course not. Instead of the wide-ranging grab bag that is the standard “Top Media Gaffes” roundup, however, let’s get more specific: Best Corrections of 2012. It’s a narrower but equally amusing category, though occasionally “corrections” also include non-corrections, given the way some organizations (cough, Fox) double down on inaccuracy and refuse to admit error. A few outlets, like the Economist (see below), even have a sense of humor in their mea culpas. It’s easy to take note of general media hilarity, like Karl Rove’s election-night meltdown, but in their straight-faced dedication to getting even the most banal facts right, official corrections are often the most endearing.

The Atlantic Wire recently compiled its favorite typos and goof-ups, starting with the Romney campaign’s notorious “A Better Amercia,” continuing to the well-trodden public/pubic mix-up (again? really?), and ending with some less interesting but deeply wonky New York Times corrections about star formation. The highlight, however, has to be this one, from the Toronto Sun:

In the same spirit, Fox News gives us this:

Poynter’s “Best (and Worst) Media Errors and Corrections of 2012” identifies some other knee-slappers. Foreign publications often take a much more light-hearted approach to amendments. Here’s the Economist:

Correction: An earlier version of this article claimed that journalists at Bloomberg Businessweek could be disciplined for sipping a spritzer at work. This is not true. Sorry. We must have been drunk on the job.

Also cited by Poynter is Vogue Magazine, which has been in the journalistic doghouse since running (and subsequently deleting from its website) an ill-timed puff piece praising Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his wife, the so-called “Rose of the Desert.” The mistake just reinforces the not-entirely-inaccurate image of the fashion magazine as ignorant of anything beyond red-soled Louboutins and thousand-dollar T-shirts. Perhaps Vogue should take a break from writing about politics, as it “mistakenly identified” Assist Secretary of State Dan Baer as  “an interior designer.”

I can see cutting Van Meter some slack if Baer were, say, Secretary of the Interior. But seriously.

Jim Romenesko’s media blog recently flagged an error from an ABC News photo credit, later corrected, that would certainly make my end-of-the-year list. Pardon the creepy mug shot:

Yeah, face-biters are creepy, but the whole county? Try Erie County.

Just yesterday, Slate issued this correction:

In a Dec. 26 “Politics,” Neil deMause wrote that Cassie was studying to be a ultrasound stenographer. She was studying to be an ultrasound sonographer.

Wow, what was the ultrasound saying to Cassie? Did the fetus dictate a novel to her — perhaps My Life In Utero? Adventures in the Womb? Or maybe she was taking notes from a particularly loquacious heart murmur.

The Times’ corrections alone provide ample fodder to a cottage industry of holier-than-thou fun-pokers. Thus we have the list-topping Times clarification about My Little Ponies:

An article on Monday about Jack Robinson and Kirsten Lindsmith, 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. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.”

Also qualifying for aggregation website The Week’s “9 Most Hilarious NYT Corrections” is this one, referring to a suspect in the attack on the American consulate in Libya:

An earlier version of this article misidentified the beverage that Ahmed Abu Khattala was drinking at the hotel. It was a strawberry frappe, not mango juice, which is what he had ordered.

Terrorists like fruity drinks — who knew? Did Bin Laden relax with a Cosmo at the end of the day?

“Best Of” lists aside, the corrections pages are consistently amusing, even if the daily errors don’t rise to End of the Year status. It’s a coincidence that I started trolling the pages a few weeks before the Atlantic published their list, but it’s a convenient time to post a few of the more humorous (though hardly as epic as the My Little Pony correction) ones I came across recently.

The Times conjures up a strange image with this mistake:

An article on Nov. 25 about the artist Malcolm Morley, who has a new exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Long Island, misstated what kind of aerial battles he watched from the rooftops during the London blitz. He and his friends watched dogfights — not duck fights.

Another Times error, this one for an article about North Korea’s recent missile launch, brings to mind another country: Spain. Francisco Franco is still dead.

[The article] misidentified, in some copies, the North Korean leader who met a day before the announcement with a delegation sent by China’s new leader, Xi Jinping. He is Kim Jong-un — not Kim Jong-il, his father, who died a year ago.

Of course, the Times could have been thinking of another communist country, where being dead is no impediment to hanging around the capital city . . . .

Vladimir Lenin, dearly departed.

Then there’s this, from Dec. 10:

An obituary on Wednesday about Eileen Moran, a visual effects producer, misstated the name of a character she helped create for a series of Budweiser commercials. It was Louie the Lizard, not Larry the Lizard.

Ah. Louie, not Larry. Glad we clarified that crucial point.

It’s easy to taunt the Gray Lady, but the Murdoch Empire has faults as well, far beyond its frequent Fox News distortions of fact and manipulations of charts. (Most notorious: the unemployment-rate graph that seemed to show 8.6% as higher than 8.8%.) The Wall Street Journal, in its facts-be-damned crusade to “prove” that lowering taxes goose the economy, recently overstepped in a major way. Forbes blogger Timothy B. Lee made the initial catch, writing that “professional alarmist Peter Schiff takes to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to make the case that the income taxes in the 1950s weren’t as confiscatory in practice as their high top marginal rates might make them sound in theory.” Unfortunately, Schiff “mangles some key facts.”

Indeed. The correction is nearly as long as the article itself. Here are some of the passages in question, versus the revised sentences, which bring  to mind the innumeracy, much lamented by the editor of the Times style manual, that leads reporters to confuse millions and billions. (“We never say “one” if we really mean “a thousand.” So why, oh why do we so often say “million” when we mean “billion”? The magnitude of the error is the same — we’re off not by one consonant, but by a factor of 1,000.) Anyway, as Lee intimates, the original is much more alarmist:

In 1958, an 81% marginal tax rate applied to incomes above $140,000, and the 91% rate kicked in at $400,000 for couples.

The corrected version:

In 1958, an 81% marginal tax rate applied to incomes above $1.08 million, and the 91% rate kicked in at $3.08 million.

Hey, what’s a couple hundred thousand dollars? $140,000, $1.08 million . . . . it’s only a factor of ten! Given the WSJ’s constant insistence that no one making $250,000 (President Obama’s threshold for extending the Bush tax cuts) should count as “rich,” you’d think the editors would appreciate the difference. Ironically, the title of Schiff’s piece is “The Fantasy of a 91 Percent Top Income Tax Rate.” Yeah. A fantasy in more ways than one.

Other publications make errors yet never even bother to fix the mistakes, much less print actual corrections. Newsweek, with its infamous rejection of fact-checkers — “We, like other news organisations today, rely on our writers to submit factually accurate material,” said a spokesperson in reaction to Niall Ferguson’s widely panned story on President Obama — is a repeat offender. (Irony: A fact checker probably would have flagged that British spelling of “organization” as out of place for an American magazine.) The magazine admits to having no fact-checking department, but perhaps it should cop to firing its copy editors as well. In addition to running a premature and incorrect headline indicating that the Republican “Plan B” to avoid the fiscal cliff had passed the House, Newsweek compounded the error with a homophone confusion that would have earned a red check for a middle school paper. As the screenshot shows, the headline was later corrected, but the English-class goof never vanished from the website.

Sloppy.

Of course, sometimes there are good reasons for not issuing a correction. Unlike Fox News, which simply ignores requests (even requests from the California governor’s office!) for retractions, or Newsweek, which is increasingly staffed by bloggers for whom accountability is a foreign notion, most news outlets are fully aware of their faux pas. But they’re also aware that some mistakes are so gigantic and obvious that, well, who needs a correction to set the audience straight? Romenesko quotes one editor who, after penning his mea culpa, admits, “But everything just sounded like an excuse. And the truth is: There is no excuse.” The sin?

It doesn’t get more head-smackingly bad than that.

Or consider this Homer Simpson (“doh!”) moment, from a Tulsa TV station:

Watch those runny noses, drivers.

So those were some highlights of 2012. While next year may not be quite as exciting — there is no Mayan apocalypse predicted for 2013 — it will surely have its share of silly media gaffes. Like a fruit-of-the-month club or a subscription to, say, Ceramics Monthly, mistakes are gifts that keep on giving.