Somewhere, a cartographer is crying in his beer.
CNN suffered a minor embarrassment Tuesday after someone in the graphics department incorrectly identified Indiana as Kentucky and vice versa. It’s a small mistake, sure, but come on. Those are distinctly shaped states! They’re not rectangles.
Maybe I’m allowing the fact I’m from Indiana cloud my judgment. Maybe that’s why I find this so amusing. Also, it’s sort of astonishing that the CNN anchor looked the problem right in the face and didn’t even blink or stutter. He just soldiers right on. What a pro.
Anyway, because CNN deals only in facts, it’s with a heavy heart that I must announce I am now a Kentuckian. Not that I have anything against the Bluegrass State. It’s just that I’m not prepared to use words like “holler” or “kin.”
CNN’s Tuesday blunder reminds me that MSNBC’s Katy Tur had a similar mishap last week when she mixed up North Dakota and Montana.
“And by the way, you’re looking at Montana on the other side, and Montana the polling doesn’t show Heidi Heitkamp in a particularly — I’m sorry, Tester, not Montana. I’m talking about North Da — No, never mind,” Tur said last Thursday.
Sen. Heidi Heitkamp is a Democrat running for re-election in North Dakota. Sen. Jon Tester is a Democrat running for re-election in Montana. As it turns out, there’s a difference!
“Ignore me. Ignore me,” Tur said after realizing Montana is not North Dakota. “I was getting Montana and North Dakota confused because I don’t know. I just was.”
“Never mind. Ignore me,” she added.
Did we as a nation stop teaching basic geography in school and no one told me about it? I mean, it’s cool if we decided somewhere to drop geography from the curriculum. I’d just like a heads-up next time.
