I am quite certain that there are some more recent examples of this taking place. The other day I was looking at a headline that misspelled Biden as "Bidon" and couldn't believe my eyes. Of course it was corrected within the hour but the fact that this was able to make it to "press" without someone correcting it says a lot about what news has become these days.
I was an editor of a newspaper in college and I did this for free as part of an educational experience. However, I feel as though I was held to a much higher professional standard than a vast majority of people that have paid jobs in this field today.
Here are a few more humorous examples of newspaper fuckups that have happened in my lifetime.
What do you even say about this? What rational english-speaking person could look at this and say "Yep, that looks good, send it to print!" Let's keep in mind that this was well before people just tapping away at a keyboard and having the authority to push out news stories at whim. This is a major newspaper that had multiple writers and presumable several editors.... and this blaringly obvious mistake made it past all of them.
I didn't intentionally blur the rest of the text and honestly it wouldn't matter what it says because this was NOT a satire newspaper. IT was a real newspaper attempting to bring people real news. All this time I thought we were supposed to stand on riverbanks and take photos of bridges for the sake of our social media accounts. I had no idea that we were actually meant to set food / vehicle on them and use them as a method of getting over the body of water. Now that i think about it that makes a lot more sense than what I had been doing which was to collect a bunch of logs and then slowly roll my car onto it and then jump in the water and push the craft across. Thank goodness we have the news to help us out yeah?
These are my favorite mistakes. It isn't a dummy responsible for this, it isn't someone unfamiliar with journalism, it is just abject laziness that makes this make its way to print. These placeholders are common in publishing software, but these days they actually will not let you publish if you haven't changed it which in my mind says a lot about the overall intelligence level of the people in the world.
It makes zero sense to me that this piece was somehow able to make it past the author, the sub-editor, and the lead editor and actually make it to print without anyone feeling as though something was wrong.
I get it: It's a puff piece about some local athletes, but that doesn't excuse the fact that you left the default editor text in place of the headline when the software was literally telling you to think of a 56 pt headline.
Terrible
Journalism today is terrible. It doesn't exist actually. All we have is propaganda and manipulation. These sorts of mistakes don't happen anymore because the dolts that were doing this have been probably promoted to the ranks of CFO or something like that. But there was a time when the mistakes of the media were humorous. These days they are all intentional and nefarious.
For me at least, i would like to return to the days when people were just stupid, instead of intentionally evil.
If you have any examples of dumb news in your local territory i would love to hear about it / see it. Comment on.