Missing the marks

It’s just a couple of little marks (namely, hyphens) missing from 4-year-old on Yahoo! Shine:

Stupidest mistake in Web headline history?

Is this headline from the Yahoo! front page the worst ever written?

What’s wrong with it? The winner of the Haitian presidential election is Michel Martelly. He beat out candidate Mirlande Manigat.

Someone at Yahoo! needs to be taken to the woodshed for that one.

The nonsense all makes sense now

The number and severity of errors that appear daily in the blogs for Yahoo! News have been baffling to me — until now. I’ve long wondered why the staffers make so many misspellings, typos, factual errors, and more. But now I know: the deputy editor for the blogs isn’t exactly an editing genius. At least not of his own writing.

Writing for the Yahoo! News blog “The Lookout,” the deputy editor manages to misspell Fukushima Daiichi, in spite of the fact that it’s appeared in every legitimate news outlet since the earthquake and tsunami in Japan:

A simple typo might be easy to overlook. But no legitimate editor would overlook the grossly misspelled fuselage or would fail to check the spelling of Massey.

The nonsense created by Yahoo! News staffers all makes sense now. There’s no competent editor in charge. And that seems just fine with the Internet giant.

Very foreign foreign affairs

When the senior foreign affairs reporter for the Yahoo! News blog “The Envoy” can’t figure out the last name of a popular French philosopher or spell the name of the French president, what are we to assume about the accuracy of other information?

I’d assume that foreign affairs are foreign to the writer and that nothing in the article is accurate. For the record, the philosopher’s last name is not Henri-Levy, it’s Levy.

And his middle name is not Henry. His name is Bernard-Henri Levy:

And the president of France is Nicolas Sarkozy; there’s no H in his name. None. But this reporter keeps insisting otherwise.

Most unreliable info source on the Web

Proving once again that Yahoo! News is the most unreliable source of information on the Internet, the senior political reporter for Yahoo! News‘ “The Ticket” makes three egregious errors in a single statement:

First, the mission isn’t going to be launched; the space shuttle will be doing the launching. The representative from Arizona is Gabrielle Giffords, and her husband won’t be seizing the shuttle by force, he’ll be commanding it.

Slight of mind

Some people confuse slight and sleight. Others have trouble choosing between than and then. And others can’t figure out when to use bear or bare. But few professional writers can’t pick the right word from any of those commonly confused pairs. It takes a really, really special writer to screw them up; and that writer works for Yahoo! Shine.

After making a typo, she Fs up sleight of hand:

Then she goes with than and bare:

But she shouldn’t bear the brunt of grammarians’ wrath. I blame her employer, who doesn’t insist that an editor approve all articles written by its staff.