Birmingham Blues

Okay, I know it’s terribly expensive to hire actual human proofreaders, but I bet the American Family Association is wishing it had made the investment after this snafu. It seems some right-wing sites use Auto-Correct on Associated Press articles to weed out language they find unacceptable. I wonder what the AP thinks about this:

…the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow website takes the phenomenon [auto-correct] one step further with its AP articles. The far-right fundamentalist group replaces the word “gay” in the articles with the word “homosexual.” I’m not entirely sure why, but it seems to make the AFA happy. The group is, after all, pretty far out there.

The problem, of course, is that “gay” does not always mean what the AFA wants it to mean. My friend Kyle reported this morning that sprinter Tyson Gay won the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials over the weekend. The AFA ran the story, but only after the auto-correct had “fixed” the article.

That means — you guessed it — the track star was renamed “Tyson Homosexual.” The headline on the piece read, “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.”

The eagle eyes at the AFA have since fixed their “fix”, but there is a screen capture here, along with some more examples of proofreading brilliance.

via Shakesville

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Religious Wrong, What Were They Thinking?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.