the kicker

Sloppy Journalism Might Rate a Warning Sticker

August 13, 2010

Warning: This article is just a highlights reel of a much funnier person’s—U.K. comedian Tom Scott’s—recent blog post. But hey, it’s Friday.

Scott muses that like sex-filled movies and violent video games there should be a “labelling system for, say, sloppy journalism and other questionable content.”

He has made some such labels and is sticking them on newspapers he’s finding on the London tube. Here are our favorites.

Warning: Statistics, survey results and/or equations in this article were sponsored by a PR company.

Warning: This article contains unsourced, unverified information from Wikipedia.

Warning: Journalist does not understand the subject they are writing about.

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The ever-helpful Scott even includes instructions and links to help you create your own stickers. We’re working on ours. How about…

Warning: This local election story mentions president Obama thirty times and the local candidates one time each.

Warning: There are twenty variations of “source who declined to be named” in this report.

Warning: Andrew Breitbart was here.

Got any suggestions? Leave them in our comments section.

Or better yet, make the stickers following Scott’s instructions, label the latest edition of your local paper—or CJR—with a warning or two, and send it into us.

Joel Meares is a former CJR assistant editor.