Thursday, January 22, 2015

No idea

The sloppily researched article
Yesterday US President Barack Obama delivered his second last State of the Union address. To mark the occasion, I noticed this error in one of my sister's New Idea magazines. New Idea is one of Australia's best selling women's magazines, with a mixture of celebrity news (both real and fabricated), recipes, health, and fashion, dished up with a side serving of occultism in the form of horoscopes and psychic medium telephone hotlines. 

Presumably the pressures of putting out a weekly magazine mean that sometimes production errors slip through unnoticed. I skim read the magazine in five minutes, but noticed this blunder in an article about Oprah Winfrey and her celebrity friends. As you can see, the caption reads that Barack Obama first ran for President in 2009. It is common knowledge that American presidents serve 4 year terms, and that since George Washington, presidential elections have always been held in leap years.

Pardon my snobbery, but New Idea has never been troubled by the need to uphold high standards of print journalism. 



1 comment:

Bethany said...

I've never understood the appeal of those magazines. We have them everywhere here in the USA. I only flip through them if I have no other alternatives, usually if I'm trapped in a waiting room somewhere.