Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Wired goof replaces Trump's name with reference to hand size

It is already clear what the word of the year will be: We at Ragan Communications are preemptively declaring it to be “yuge,” checking off that task for Oxford Dictionaries in 2016.

Now a magazine has published a correction that can’t possibly be topped, so we might as well flip our calendars ahead to January 2017.

It turns out that Wired—the publication for tech geniuses who are hip to gender differences in mobile app use and embarrassingly well-informed on sex with robots—got caught in a forehead-slapping Donald Trump-related goof right in the thick of the presidential primaries.

It seems the IT whizzes couldn’t figure out how to install or use a Chrome extension. (Please, PRs and comms people: Uninstall any risky extensions you have set up for laughs.)

Wired, please come up to the front of the classroom and explain yourself.

As the magazine reports:

Correction at 9:58 a.m. on 3/09/2016: Due to an oversight involving a haphazardly-installed Chrome extension during the editing process, the name Donald Trump was erroneously replaced with the phrase “Someone With Tiny Hands” when this story originally published.

Yet even after Wired posted corrections Wednesday, editors hadn’t fixed the same mistake in another story from Monday, titled “Poor Ted Cruz Doesn’t Even Get a Funko Election Figurine,” Gizmodo reported.

Here’s an example of how Wire’s pre-correction copy read (emphasis added):

Someone With Tiny Hands may have bullied his way into the center of the American political arena, but during his Super Tuesday victory speech last week, the real action took place in the margins. That’s where you could find Chris Christie apparently lost in reverie, his bewildering expressions instantly stealing the spotlight from Someone With Tiny Hands’s choreographed Main Event.

The size of Trump’s hands (which, at the risk of taking a stand on one of the major political controversies of our day, look normal to me) have been a subject of jokes since the now-defunct Spy magazine long ago referred to him as a “short-fingered vulgarian.”

Learning that Trump seethed over this, his foes in the journalistic world have trolled him by sneaking in references to his hand size in their copy. Recently, GOP belly-flop artist Marco Rubio seemed to make insinuations about the size of another of Trump’s body parts, leading to the season’s political highlight in this great democracy of ours.

I’ll let a CNN headline take it from here: “Donald Trump defends size of his penis.”

The PR damage for Trump? You’re kidding, right? He feeds on free attention—and on pitching the notion to his followers that most journalists and the entire GOP establishment are driven insane by his success (which, to be fair, they are). He’s sure to mention Wired on the Republican Convention floor this summer.

For the digital experts at Wired, though (don’t sit down; we’re not through with you yet), it can’t be a good week. We all make mistakes, but somehow it’s delicious when know-it-alls stumble so spectacularly in the area of their expertise.

Slate calls the correction “glorious.” The Chicago Tribune laughed along in a local-boy-makes-good story noting that the creator of the extension, known as “Make America’s Hands Tiny Again,” was the same fella writing a satirical, profanity-laden Twitter account called @MayorEmanuel.

And Twitter? Need you ask? Yes, Twitter’s gone nuts.

Let us bow our heads and say a prayer of gratitude for the Founding Fathers who bequeathed us this great system of ours, the envy of the world. Let us likewise be glad that the rest of the year really can’t be skipped. Who’d want to miss all this fun?

@ByWorking



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