the kicker

Huffraking

April 17, 2009

The screen grab: once again showing itself to be a muckraking tool of the digital age.

Up until this morning, The Huffington Post reports, the State Department Web site had a bizarre error on Hillary Clinton’s “foreign countries visited” list; see if you can spot it:

Indeed. Dear Madame Secretary: Texas is, uh, still part of the Union. But State’s gaffe was particularly ill-timed (or: prescient?), given the fact that Texas Governor Rick Perry, responding to all the tax-day Tea Parties earlier this week, suggested that Texas might actually consider secession. While “we’ve got a great union,” and “there’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it,” the governor said, “…if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot.”

The mess with Texas has now been scrubbed from State.gov, but not before the HuffPo’s Arthur Delaney got a screen grab of it. Behold, the power of Control-shift-4…

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Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.