A correction to a NBC News blog post:
Due to an editing error in a Feb. 8 report in "Blogging Baghdad," we incorrectly reported that the Prophet Muhammad was killed instead of passing away peacefully. His grandson, Iman Hussein, was killed in the 680 AD battle that is commemorated during the Shiite holy festival of Ashoura. Link
On Thursday the Trentonian newspaper reported about a New Jersey radio DJ who had a heated exchange with Ryan Seacrest about whether or not he was gay. From the story:
"Ryan," Carton said, "Are you gay?"
Silence.
"Ryan, are you a homosexual?"
With that, Seacrest was headed for the door.
"I can’t stay here, man," Seacrest said. "I gotta jet."
The "American Idol" star stormed out of the studio and into the NJ-101.5 offices, but he was coaxed back into the studio with the understanding that the rest of the interview would center on the television show and not on his personal life.
"This was supposed to be about the show, about ‘American Idol,’" Seacrest said when he returned to the air.
Co-host Ray Rossi, an admitted "Idol" fan, was ready to move on, but Carton wouldn’t let up.
"Are you gonna walk out again if I ask you about it?" Carton asked Seacrest.
"Absolutely. I’m outta here," said Seacrest.
Immediately, Carton asked "Are you gay?" "You know," Seacrest said, "I don’t know why I trusted you."
And, again, Seacrest was out the door, this time for good.
Pretty shocking, huh? Well, it was a prank. That wasn't Seacrest on the air; it was an impersonator. As a story in Newsday noted, this isn't the first time this radio show has pulled a prank. "During yesterday's show, Carton recalled the duo's interview
three years ago with singer Bobby Darin, who had died 30 years earlier," it noted.
"Carton also promised that listeners can expect another scam three years
from now."
As is frequently the case, the story spread from the Trentonian to other papers such as the Philly Daily News and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Gawker also noted the item. The DJ later revealed the interview was a fake, causing several outlets to run corrections. We've noted some below. One problem, however, is that the Trentonian's original, incorrect story is still on their site without any correction appended. (The paper did run a corrective article, which is excerpted below.)
Dan Gross would like to apologize to Ryan Seacrest and to Daily News
readers for an incorrect report in his Thursday column. It was not
Seacrest, the host of Fox’s “American Idol,” who stormed out of an
interview with New Jersey 101.5 Wednesday afternoon. It was an
imposter. “Jersey Guys” hosts Craig Carton and Ray Rossi were
interviewing a Seacrest impersonator when they repeatedly asked whether
the TV star were gay.
The radio hosts yesterday acknowledged the prank, which was covered on the front page of the Trentonian, and also led to a flood of media calls to New Jersey 101.5 yesterday.
“It’s nice to know a radio station can still pull off a stunt like this…We can take anyone down…it’s within our power. The Washington Post wanted to do a front-page story for tomorrow. That’s the power the Jersey Guys have,” the megalomaniacal Carton said.
Carton also poked fun at Gross for the erroneous report and said “I wouldn’t want to be that guy today.” Neither would we.
Seacrest’s publicist Meredith O’Sullivan told Gross yesterday her
client has never done an interview with New Jersey 101.5, but had
nothing else to say about the radio prank. Link
An
item in Friday's Peach Buzz about American Idol host Ryan Seacrest
storming out of a radio interview was incorrect. New Jersey 101.5 did
an interview with a man pretending to be Seacrest as a hoax, according
to the Philadelphia Daily News, the original source of the information. Link
You know how it didn’t really make sense that Ryan Seacrest would be
doing a live, in-studio radio interview in New Jersey? And how it
didn’t really make sense why, after the first time he walked out of the
studio because the DJ asked about his sexuality, he would have agreed
to continue the interview? Yeah, well, it now makes sense that it
didn’t make sense. Because it turns out it didn’t actually happen... Link
We were scammed.
Local radio station New Jersey-101.5 pulled an on-air prank Wednesday afternoon and we fell for it.
So did other media outlets from New York to Philadelphia and beyond -- including The Trentonian.
During
Wednesday’s "Jersey Guys" broadcast, host Craig Carton told listeners
that television’s "American Idol" host, Ryan Seacrest, was there inside
the Ewing studio as part of a publicity tour for the show.
Yesterday,
however, Carton revealed that the whole thing had been a hoax and that
he’d enlisted someone with a similar-sounding voice to act the part of
Seacrest.
Listeners - and media outlets - were fooled by Wednesday’s fake interview... Link
Alessandra Stanley's often alarming corrections were the subject of much discussion this past year. It largely began because of the ridiculous and embarrassing Geraldo nudge that wasn't. Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune gave her a kick in a column, citing some of her errors (the link to the piece is no longer active), and then John Cook of Reference Tone dove in here. Gawker got in on the act and kept after her with its "Alessandra Stanley Watch."
Now Gawker has gone one better and done research that it claims proves Stanley is the most inaccurate of all New York Times cultural critics. "We checked 2005 corrections rates on 19 Times
cultural critics, and we discovered that Stanley can comfortably claim
the title as Most Inaccurate 2005," they write. "Indeed, she’s more than twice as
inaccurate as the average non-Stanley critic at the Times." The five least accurate Times cultural critics, according to Gawker:
One little note: Some corrections contain more than one error, so the number of corrections doesn't necessarily mean the number of errors. Not to say that this nitpick negates Gawker's interesting research.
Gawker got its hands on a New York Times memo that is also a correction. It seems that the address provided for people to send books to imprisoned Times staffer Judith Miller was wrong. (Gawker headlined the item, "They Probably Got the Address From Chalabi." Ouch.) The memo, as printed by Gawker:
August 22, 2005
Judy Miller Address Correction
The address to send books to Judy Miller was incorrect. The error was caught by C.J. Satterwhite, a news assistant for City Weekly, who had a 34-lb box of books returned to her.
Here is the correct address:
Barbara Brincefield
Cahill, Gordon, Reindel
1990 K St. N.W., Suite 950
Washington, DC 20006
From Michael Barone's blog:
In my August 25 post I made a mistake...
The blogger I cited was not Jeff Jarvis, of www.buzzmachine.com (http://www.buzzmachine.com), but Jay Rosen, of New York University. Since I linked to the correct post (http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/08/19/ab_rlfwd.html), many readers may well have caught the error and therefore were not materially misled. Still, I'm sorry for the sloppiness, and I apologize to Jay Rosen and to Jeff Jarvis. In his courteous E-mail pointing out my mistake, Rosen notes that many people confuse him and Jarvis and wonders why. My reply was that both have first names starting with J and both seem (to me anyway) to specialize in intelligent press criticism not from a right-of-center perspective--a small category, I think.
