Amusingly bad editing

Example one:

I spotted an AP article on Salon.com with the headline ‘Bush Holds Latin American Ally at Ranch.’ Maybe I’ve just been reading a lot of stories about torture at Gitmo and in US controlled prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, but no matter how many times I read the headline it still gives me completely the wrong impression.

Other versions of the headline used by other news outlets reporting the same story:

Colombia president to meet Bush – BBC

Bush Welcomes Colombia’s Uribe at Ranch – Manchester Guardian

Bush Hosts Latin American Ally at Ranch – Manchester Guardian running the same AP story as Salon. Extra points for fixing the headline.

Bush welcomes Colombian leader – San Antonio Express

Let me suggest in the future that the editors at the Associated Press and/or Salon try and remember the difference between the words ‘hold’ and ‘host.’

Example two:

I was on the website Torrentspy.com, looking for some illegal downloads (of course, an activity I only engage in when I’m outside of the United States) when I spotted this article about the possible re-legalization of medical LSD in Russia. I don’t have any particular fascination with LSD, having never even bothered to try it, but it is a topic of moderate interested and so I proceeded to skim the article. Nothing about it really stuck in my mind until I got to the following bit:

Barbara Streisand signed the above-mentioned petition. The actress confessed that LSD helped her survive the nervous breakdown she had after discovering that her only son was a faggot.

I may actually have done a double-take; when was the last time you saw somebody called a faggot in a newspaper article?

I looked up the original source of the article, the English version of the Russian Pravda. The same line at English.pravda.ru reads:

The actress confessed that it was LSD, which helped her survive the nervous breakdown, when the star discovered that her only son was a homosexual.

I’m glad to see that they corrected that gaff. As offensive as it was, I can actually believe it was an honest mistake by a Russian translator whose linguistic command of English surpasses his cultural understanding. On the other hand, Salon still has their truly lousy headline.