The Australian is a national broadsheet newspaper published by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd, and in terms of quality and direction is fairly similar to the British Times. I suppose. Like any paper it makes the odd mistake, and has to publish a correction. On Tuesday it published the following.
A story headlined ‘Syria seeks our help to woo US’ in Saturday’s Weekend Australian misquoted National Party senator Sandy Macdonald. The quote stated: “Syria is a country that has been a bastard state for nearly 40 years” but should have read “Syria is a country that has been a Baathist state for nearly 40 years.” The Australian regrets any embarrassment caused by the error.
Personally I think that if anyone is embarrassed by this, there is absolutely no need for regret whatsoever. But that may be just me.
(Thanks to crikey.com.au for pointing this out).
Error? What error?
That was an error? I thought they were reporting the truth. Well surprises for everyone.
Sometimes, spellcheck isn’t your friend.
As Tim Blair says, it would have been nice if they’d explained the difference.
How dare they correct a moment of pure, unvarnished truth!
Good think they weren’t trying to say it was one quaint state. No telling how badly that might have gone.
Not often a paper makes a Freudian slip!
Not often a paper makes a Freudian slip!
That’s because Freudians have exceptional balance…
Gor blimey, mate, those accents’ll get you every time. (Pronounced something like “toime”.)
The reporter must have been using a speech recognition application. The physicians I work for use speech recognition for medical reports, and some of them hate it.
Chet, I met one of your doctors once. I asked for “a free bottle in front of me”, instead got “a pre-frontal lobotomy” and now tape John Kerry speeches for the content.
Recently, I was watching a noontime TV news report out of Boston, and they announced that, after the commercial, they were going to cover a story about vandalism at a native American temple.
We stared at each other. A native American temple? What the heck is that?! A giant bark-covered teepee or something?
After the break, they came back to a story…about an obviously Hindu temple.
Ohhhhhh. Hahaha. Light dawns. I wonder if that was an automated substitution, or if there was a supremely ignorant monkey working the teleprompter that day.
Very funny. I smell a spell-check correction here….
A Freudian slip?
Isn’t that where you mean to say one thing, but say your mother?
Bastard state! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAAHHAHAHA!
Indian/Native American temple! HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!
Much humor.
In 1958 the syrians (spit) tried to start a socialist revolution in Lebanon. The RL gov’t knew that tehy couldn’t go it alone. The french would not help. They asked the US.
And the marines showed up. Scared the little pinkos, i guess. they drew on the large number of arab immigrants in their ranks, and had a large number of arabic speakers. Many of them availed themselves of visiting family.
It took the syrians (spit) 15 years to make their way back in, and only then during the civil war.
who do you think got fired for that little mistake? or perhaps it was a prank?
No one should take offense?
What about the poor bastards who don’t deserve to be associated with Syria?