Wow, who would have guessed??! It turns out Michelle Obama didn't order Iranian caviar, two whole lobsters, a lobster hors d'oeuvres and champagne from room service the other night, as the Post's Page Six claimed. The wife of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama ate an entirely different treasonous elitist meal (probably) somewhere else. In fact, she wasn't even staying at the Waldorf-Astoria, as Page Six had it. Whoops. The gossip section so did not see this coming, because why wouldn't you run with something so plausible? "We regret the mistake, and our former source is going to regret it, too," it said today. To really make up for it, the paper went ahead and smeared conservative Ann Coulter, by way of trashing McCain:

Tragedy Averted! We Think! New reports from Reuters quote a statement from Stevie Wonder denying his house was among those burned in the deadly Sesnon wildfire. "I'm grateful to say that my house was not burned down in the fire," Wonder said. "I extend my sympathies to anyone who may have been touched by this horrendous event." Thank you, Stevie; it means a lot to us. Nick Nolte's home, alas, remains destroyed. [Reuters]

So it turns out that the same night James Cramer was bragging about foretelling the Wall Street meltdown he was in the midst of a colossal fuckup. The CNBC host on September 15 recommended shares of Wachovia as a safe haven from the financial panic. Cramer took comfort in the words his former Goldman Sachs boss Robert Steel, who earlier in the show said his company Wachovia had "a great future." "You're a reassuring face," Cramer told him. In between, a CNBC promo promised "Fast, accurate, actionable, unbiased" advice. Wachovia of course went to liquidate at $1 per share Monday, less than a tenth of its value when Cramer recommended the stock. Cramer quickly apologized Monday night. "I wasn't skeptical enough," he said. It's all in the video after the jump.

"Because of a production error, a passage from this correction was merged in some editions on Tuesday with an International correction, above, about the Moscow Journal." [Times]

Earlier, BoomTown reported that MSN exec Jeff Dossett would leave the company and possibly soon join Yahoo, where his longtime friend and fellow Microsoft alumna Joanne Bradford already works. Not true, says a Microsoft flack, who tells us: "Jeff Dossett is leaving his position as MSN’s US Executive Producer to seek other opportunities within Microsoft." So either Swisher got it wrong, or Yahoo got outbid for Dossett's services at the last minute. Given Swisher's red phone access to Yahoo's inner sanctum, we're guessing the latter is true. We haven't spoken to Dossett, who once climbed Mount Everest to raise awareness for AIDS and HIV in Africa, but we imagine if we did he'd say something like: "Join Yahoo, now? Too risky."

That hugely embarrassing mistake at the New York Times we told you about yesterday? The staff of the New York Post certainly seems quite pleased. [NYP]

Wall Street has been on a historic roller coaster all week, and there's no doubt it's tiring out some business reporters. It was only Monday morning that Times business writer Andrew Ross Sorkin said on CNBC, where he puts in the extra multimedia shift now common to newspaper reporters, that he was operating on just two hours sleep. So perhaps it should not have been entirely surprising that the Times business desk printed Thursday a sensational quote it has now retracted, because it seems no one ever said it.

This is what happens when you let an Australian-born media mogul buy an American newspaper and import his chief editor from Britain: Suddenly no one on staff can correctly identify the country to the north (for the record, it's "Canada" — just "Canada"). And to think we actually believed Robert Thomson would make the Wall Street Journal more globalist! [WSJ]

You'll no doubt recall how Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan yesterday inadvertently told MSNBC that Sarah Palin's nomination as the Republican vice presidential candidate was "political bullshit." What you may not appreciate is that poor Noonan was "mugged by the nature of modern media," just like Jesse Jackson when he appeared on Journal corporate sibling Fox News. To clear the air, Noonan told a story about how the selection of Palin this year is a lot like the selection of Dan Quayle to the ticket in 1988. That should settle everyone down! Take it away, Peggy:

Wow, those scoop artists at Bloomberg are really on a roll! First they got the exclusive on Apple CEO Steve Jobs's obituary. Sure, Jobs wasn't actually dead, but the report generated all sorts of interesting attention and buzz. Now the financial wire's editors have become the first in the world to report that John McCain's running mate Sarah Palin was arrested 22 years ago on a drunken-driving charge. Bloomberg arrived at this conclusion after misreading the Times, which reported that Palin's husband was arrested 22 years ago on a drunk-driving charge. Compounding the mistake, a tipster told us, is that the error was silently fixed, with no correction issued — "a verboten act under the Bloomberg way." Perhaps the DC bureau, headed by old Wall Street Journal hand Al Hunt, conspired to guard against anyone's summary dismissal from the unforgiving high-pressure news organization. Click the thumbnail to see Bloomberg's original mistake.

So. Yesterday, Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones died. And just about every news outlet you can think of reported as much. Fine so far, right? Except that when they all reported it, she wasn't dead. And then once everyone corrected, she died, for real. It was all pretty macabre. CJR tries to explain the whole weird incident with another criticism of media practices-anonymous sources and me-tooism or something. What no one (we think?) has pointed out is that the news probably came from her own staff ("Based on information from a reliable Democratic source and stories from other news outlets..."). Which is a pretty unimpeachable source! Until it turned out that they were wrong about their own boss's death. And then they weren't, a bit later. Awkward. [CJR]

The Times published two amazing corrections this morning, starting with one stating that the newspaper had erroneously called Republican presidential candidate John McCain a "fighter pilot" on Sunday and in "numerous other Times articles the past dozen years." Wow, a correction that spans more than a decade! When McCain was famously shot down over Vietnam, he was flying his usual plane, a small jet aircraft known as the A-4 Skyhawk, which the Times now refers to as an "attack aircraft." That's a safe and widely-agreed upon label for the plane pilots dubbed "Scooter" (heh), but the newspaper needn't have apologized for calling it a "fighter." Many in the aviation community regard it as precisely that, starting with the military's most famous training program, Top Gun.

Que lastima! Has the Johansson-on-Cruz-on Bardem threesome from Vicky Cristina Barcelona been excised? Well, no, although that didn't stop New York's Vulture reporters from declaring, "As die-hard Allen fans who'd love to see one of his movies turn a profit for once, we're sad to report that all threesomes are implied and happen strictly off-camera," which spurred a distraught Gawker to post "Vicky Cristina Barcelona's Big Three-Way Lie." There's just one thing: as the two-thirds of Defamer who've seen the movie can confirm, there is an on-screen threesome in Vicky Cristina Barcelona — albeit a tame, brief one. Details after the jump:

Well god damn. Banksy really is mysterious! A couple of weeks ago we showed you what was allegedly a 1999 photo of Banksy, the once-secret-but-now-maybe-not street artist. Before that, there had only been one known photo of the man in existence. But now...it looks like there's still only one known photo. Stupid Brits and their stupid names! Here's what happened: A tipster wrote in to point out that the new photo we found is probably not of Banksy, the artist; it's of Banxy, the break dancer. Well who the fuck can keep track, really? Banxy is a dancer and performer in the UK who once appeared in a dance TV show with Deborah Bull, the British ballet dancer who appears with "Banksy" in this photo:

Sometimes it's the big mistakes that are the easiest to miss. Especially when half the editors are out on summer vacation and you've outsourced production to interns, who have outsourced it to drunken monkeys. The abject correction is after the jump.

Error-prone Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley made a mistake everyone!

The great thing about the Web is you can update things at any time! You know, or not.

We got tipped on this an hour ago and happily it still hasn't been corrected. The New York Post's review of Mamma Mia comes with bracketed editor's notes asking the reviewer to clarify vague passages! At no extra charge! Anyone want to check the print version for us? In case they fix it, click to see the screengrabs. [NYP]

Guy Kawasaki's $12,107.09 rumor site has indeed been bought by NowPublic, a citizen journalism enterprise. But NowPublic hasn't, as we incorrectly presumed yesterday, shuttered Truemors. Sorry, Guy, and what a relief: Every time I try to read NowPublic's self-important essays such as "An Open Letter to Senator Barack Obama Concerning Talk of an Asassination," I find myself back-buttoning to Truemors for a chaser like "Public Toilet in India Pays to Pee."

From the Times today: "An article today in Sunday Business about missed opportunities to reduce America's dependence on imported oil refers to a 1990 effort by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, to block higher mileage requirements for vehicles and notes that Mr. Helms did not return calls seeking comment. The section went to press on Thursday, before Mr. Helms’s death Friday morning."