There are three areas where the press regularly stumbles: Firearms, abortion, and faith.
We’ve seen many recent examples of the first category of ignorance. The second category is a bit rarer, normally seen only during legislative battles.
The final category is a bit of a wild card. You never know when it’ll surface.
As luck (or misfortune, depending on how you look at it) would have it, the faith category of media illiteracy appeared Tuesday in a Wall Street Journal article titled, “Sheldon Adelson Facilitated EPA Connection for Israeli Firm.”
In the original version of the story — which three people worked on! — a line quoted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as saying of a group that specializes in water purification that it “improves on Moses….He brought water from Iraq. They bring water from thin air.”
The Journal published an editor’s note Wednesday that reads, “An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Benjamin Netanyahu said Moses brought water from Iraq. He said the water was brought from a rock.”
Yes, that’s right. The famous story, known to all people with even modest Biblical literacy, is that Moses struck the rock and water flowed from it.
Why would anyone on the Journal’s staff think that Moses had brought water from Iraq, a country not very close to Egypt, from which Moses led the Israelites on foot, and which wouldn’t exist for more than 30 centuries after his death? How does that make any sense in terms of the full Netanyahu quote? Is bringing water from Iraq so impressive that it can be compared to bringing water from “thin air?”
How did this make it past three authors and an editor?
This is almost as good as the time when the Associated Press issued a correction explaining it was unfamiliar with the term “sitting shiva.”
“In a story Feb. 22 about the Florida school shooting, The Associated Press misquoted Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel in some versions of the story when he spoke about the families of the victims,” the correction reads. “He said, ‘I’ve been to their homes where they’re sitting shiva,’ not ‘where they sit and shiver.'”
