Oh, Wall Street Journal. Somebody there has poor reading comprehension skills. Or hates PR people. [Thanks, P!]

This week, a former New York Times editor revealed that the NYT got handed the Watergate storywell before the Washington Post had it, but they just...forgot about it, or something. Now the full scope of this foolishness is coming out; the comedy of errors continues to this day:

Quick, somebody get Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh on the phone, because not only is our Muslim-communist Dear Leader taking over all of American industry, he's also dishing out Academy Awards!

A tipster sends us this photo of an actual advertisement in Sweden, which, she explains, is a result of the stubborn Swedes' tendency to believe their fancy schools actually teach them proper English. Psht:

This headline from the Trentonian is about some traffic accident. Just go with it. It was nearly as clever as this item from the Guardian's music blog, screen-grabbed by an alert reader:

Everybody in the media fucks up once in a while. Sometimes the fallout is bad. Remember when Bloomberg accidentally ran Steve Jobs' obituary while he was still alive? Then shortly afterward they mistakenly ran an old headline about United's bankruptcy as if it was current, and temporarily destroyed the company's stock price? Both are very bad errors, but at least Bloomberg apologized for them. Which is more than you can say for Dow Jones, which handily fails to mention its own mistake that crushed GE's stock price yesterday: With 15 minutes left in the trading day yesterday, Dow Jones ran a mistaken report that (almost singlehandedly) erased the day's gains in the DJ Industrial Average:

Bloomberg News' rather embarrassing faux pas—posting Apple chief Steve Jobs' obituary before he's actually dead—has now been chuckled at by just about everyone. It's not the sort of publicity that Bloomberg's bow-tied editorial boss Matthew Winkler, a notorious tyrant, wanker, and stickler for detail, is fond of. This is a man who threw a legendary tantrum (listen to it here!) while firing a reporter for making a far less egregious error. So the immediate reaction among those familiar with him to news of the Jobs obit was, "Heads will roll." Our question: whose heads? Email us if you have any information on the fallout. Though we personally encourage restraint and forgiveness.

Ok we are BREAKING OUR OWN PLEDGE here and passing along two bits of fantastic News-Free Vice Presidential Speculation Updates. FIRST: Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal accidentally sent out a statement saying Obama chose Tim Kaine. Hah. So we know it's not him! Second: for some reason, everyone is now claiming totally obscure conservative Texas congressman CHET EDWARDS is a finalist. Yes, of course. Because this is the perfect season to roll out those OBAMA/EDWARDS lawn signs, right? Jesus Christ.

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]

Times tv critic Alessandra Stanley gets a lot of shit around here for making mistakes. It's not just that she makes a lot of them (though she does, or did), it's that she makes obvious, egregious ones that seem to suggest that she doesn't actually watch tv. But she's gotten better about it! She says. She told Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici that she's "trying to avoid" corrections, which is apparently a change of pace for her. How's she doing? Pretty well! She hasn't had a correction since she got the date of the Iraq war wrong 103 days ago. Her longest streak since 2002! BUT!

"Newsweek galvanizes readers with several hard-hitting stories. The editors manage to eulogize William F. Buckley Jr. without lionizing him, making the case that the New Republic founder leaves behind an important political legacy." Most important legacy: founding the National Review, not founding the New Republic. The Post is supposed to know all this stuff about fellow conservatives. We expect more from a paper founded by William Kunstler. [NYP]

Ridiculously error-prone New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley has been making reliably glaring mistakes in every single piece she has published in the newspaper of record for years now. Here's today's, in her story about how MSNBC is trying very hard not to upset the Clintons anymore: "MSNBC calls its stars 'the best political team' on television, but at the moment some players are in disgrace." A free cookie to Slate's Jack Shafer, who wrote an entire column about how annoying it is that CNN uses that "best political team" slogan incessantly. Does Ms. Stanley own a TV? Or have an editor? [NYT]

Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley doesn't like that new Fox show with the lie detector. She dislikes is so much, in fact, that she reserved her trademark glaring inaccuracy for a statement about a game show on a rival network: "Before picking the correct suitcase to win $1 million on 'Deal or No Deal' Wednesday night, a contestant named Britney told the audience that her father was so nervous he placed Maxi Pads in his armpits." Oh, Alessandra. Britney took the deal and went home with $471,000. We can't verify the accuracy of the Maxi Pads story. [NYT]

Happy Bill Kristol's First OpEd in the Times day! He got off to a great start, babbling about Huckabee and quoting Michelle Malkin as saying something Michael Medved said. Alert Barney Calame! [E&P]

Page Six, on Jay-Z: "An industry insider says, 'He is scrambling - the first single, "Black Magic," isn't being played on radio. It's the first time in his career he's not doing well.'" Sad! Maybe the insider should try listening for Jay-Z's actual new single "Blue Magic" though. [NYP]

Page Six correctly identifies ABC News correspondent and former World News Tonight anchor Bob Woodruff once today before reporting on his tour of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, visiting soldiers "who've suffered traumatic brain injuries like Woodward's," in their words (and our emphasis). Well, Watergate journo Bob Woodward may have dropped off a bit in recent years, but that "traumatic brain injury" accusation seems a bit harsh, even for Page Six. And where is Woodward catching shrapnel exactly? Embedded with the contractors replacing the cabinets in his Georgetown kitchen?

Slate's media scold Jack Shafer gets to abuse newspapers today by writing about a new study that found that fewer than 2% of stories with errors got corrected in a group of ten metro daily newspapers. This is where we jump up and down and yell "One of us, one of us!" Can we put the bogeyman of how those stupid blogs are error-ridden and never correct anything in a shallow grave now? (Actually maybe let's see how the rest of today goes here before we start gloating. Feeling kind of over-caffeinated and error-ridden already! Might print anything!)