Whoops! Slate‘s C-Word Slip-up

There are Freudian slips and then there’s what Slate did Tuesday of this week when a headline writer must have gotten his or her thoughts twisted in a knot.

Slate editor David Plotz issued a statement to Big Journalism, which noticed the error, Wednesday morning stating the headline was unintended. He wrote, “It’s embarrassing. It’s a mistake, and of course we didn’t intend it. It slipped by our corrections monitoring yesterday night. We’re correcting it now.”

The correction added to the end of story: “Correction, Feb. 23: This post’s headline originally included a profanity. It has been fixed.”

BigGovernment wasn’t satisfied. They pointed out that during the ’08 presidential race, liberal activists wore T-shirts that read: “Sarah Palin is a c***” with the c-word fully spelled out.” They spell out the journalistic mishap, saying, “The Slate article itself does not bear a timestamp, but the comments begin at “Yesterday, 5:18:42 p.m.” indicating the article with the offensive headline was up for approximately eighteen hours before being corrected after being queried about it by Big Journalism.”

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