Washington Post Somehow Confuses Malcolm X for the President (UPDATED)

Wow, this is kind of painful. While it’s always funny to see a bad mess up in the media, you always have to feel for whoever is behind the scenes getting reamed out by their bosses. And you have to really feel bad for people who make two huge mistakes in one day. That, unfortunately, is just what happened to the people who check the captions for the Washington Post’s photos. Yesterday they made the incredibly bizarre flub of saying that the actor Giovanni Ribisi was in The Roots. And today, the The Daily What is reporting that the venerable paper put up a caption mistaking Malcolm X for our president, Barack Obama. Ouch.

While some might claim that the Washington Post was making some kind of political statement, the mistake was most likely made because Malcolm X was back in the news as his killer was paroled yesterday. Seriously though, how do you confuse those two men? The civil rights activist had glasses and a distinctive gap in his tooth. Not to mention the fact that the picture the caption describes is clearly decades old.

People in the media make mistakes all the time. This very writer has already had to update some bad information in his short time at Mediaite. It’s just unfortunate for the caption writers that their errors are so hilarious to look at.

(via The Daily What and Huffington Post)

UPDATE: After checking the WaPo website we’ve noticed that on some slower computers, the caption occasionally changes slightly slower than the image on their stories. It’s possible that the reader who originally sent the screen grab to The Daily What might have caught it at an unfortunate moment and that’s what caused the discrepancy. It seems unlikely that, if that were the case, the image and the caption would look that clear and that someone was able to take the image at that exact moment. However, we want to give them the benefit of the doubt and post the possibility because a mistake like that would make a person sick and getting called on one you didn’t actually make would be even worse.