John Kerry Chooses...YOU!

So it looks like Kerry chose a running mate while I was away. Newspapers don't usually screw this kind of news up, but when they do it's always kind of funny. The New York Post, New York's version of the Boston Herald, was behind the latest lapse of journalistic veracity, by printing a story that announced that Gephardt was John Kerry's VP candidate.

The New York Post, in a front page gaffe reminiscent of the 1948 headline wrongly announcing President Truman's defeat, proclaimed Tuesday that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry would select Rep. Dick Gephardt as his running mate.

"KERRY'S CHOICE," read the headline over the page one "exclusive" story. "Dem picks Gephardt as VP candidate."

It's good to know that their journalists have such an intrepid respect for the facts that they printed up an entire story ahead of time about something that never happened. On the other hand, it's only the New York Post, a third-rate newspaper. Oh, but it's not their first time!

Last October, after the New York Yankees defeated the Boston Red Sox in the American League playoffs, the Post mistakenly ran an editorial bemoaning the home team's loss. Post Editor in Chief Col Allan blamed that foul-up on a simple production error.

Production error? Like we went ahead and produced two versions of the story and the one we released turned out to be not the one that happened? This is especially troubling because it was an editorial, and editorials are supposed to be gut reactions to actual events, not something some guy writes up hypothetically, although in this case I think the error speaks more to the fact that Yankees fans have far less confidence in their corporate monstrosity of a team than they like to convey.

In the case of the latest gaffe, the post cites "inaccurate information" as being responsible for the mixup:

Post editor in chief Col Allan said in a statement that he made the decision to go with the Gephardt story based on information that turned out to be inaccurate. He did not elaborate.

I wonder what the source of that bad tip was? Hmmmm:

The Daily News gleefully chortled Wednesday's front page about the embarrassing Tuesday "exclusive" by its fierce rival in naming Rep. Richard Gephardt rather than Sen. John Edwards as Democrat John Kerry's choice to be his running mate for the White House.

In the latest skirmish between the morning newspapers in their nearly century-old battle for New York's blue-collar readership, the Daily News cover blared "KERRY'S REAL CHOICE," with a picture of Kerry and Edwards.

"N.C. Sen. John Edwards will be the Democratic veep candidate, and the Post is wrong again," added the Daily News, which is privately owned by publisher Mort Zuckerman.