During the 1992 presidential campaign, when incumbent Vice President Dan Quayle made a spelling mistake, the New York Times was all over it. It’s clear from the Times’s story that the rest of the media was also in full pursuit:

So Jay Leno has a week’s worth of new Dan Quayle jokes. At a school here, everyone was quite hush-hush the day after the visiting Vice President spelled potato wrong while directing a spelling bee.

….. Reporters stood around today for hours outside of the house where 12-year-old William Figueroa lives. He has become a national celebrity for having spelled the word correctly on the blackboard, only to have Mr. Quayle, holding a flash card with the word spelled incorrectly, encourage him to add an E at the end.

On Friday, Barack Obama, as NewsBusters John Stephenson reported, told an Oregon audience that “I’ve been in 57 states, (with) I think one left to go.”

Searches at the Times on [Obama “57 states”] and [Obama “fifty-seven states”] — each typed as indicated — came up with the following results:

But a Times search on “Quayle potato” (not in quotes) from June 10 to November 10, 1992 shows that the Old Gray Lady’s reporters, columnists, writers, and editorialists went back to the story another 38 times between that first story and shortly after Election Day.

Identical Obama-related searches at the Washington Post yielded the following (57 states; fifty-seven states):

The Associated Press? Surely you jest (here and here).

A Google News search on the first of the two terms returned 27 results, only four of which could be considered Old Media outlets: at a Reuters blog; a Bloomberg “Campaign Notebook” item carried at the Houston Chronicle; a Los Angeles Times blog entry; and an MSNBC “First Read” blog entry. Only Reuters gave the story headline coverage.

The others buried it in a series of presidential campaign-related items (”snippets,” if you will). It was the fifth topic at Bloomberg, the third at the LA Times, and made up the last two paragraphs of a 1250-word entry at MSNBC.

(UPDATE: An NB commenter [thanks for catching it!] has pointed out that there is also an LA Times blog entry near the end of those 27 results that has headline treatment. I would suggest that it’s doubtful that the paper has given the "Obama 57" story main-site or print edition treatment. This LAT site search on [Obama "57 states"] would appear to confirm that.)

Old Media’s treatment of the story thus far indicates a strong likelihood that Obama’s arguably dumber gaffe has not found its way into the primary web sites or print editions of most newspapers, and that it never will. Has the flub made it, or will it make it, to network and/or cable newscasts? The prognosis is: Doubtful.

By contrast, a Google News Archive Search on “Quayle potato” for the period from June 10 to November 10, 1992 — likely an incomplete rendering of the news that was available at the time — returned over 850 items (link is to Page 43 of a 20-per-page list). A scan of the results indicates that the press not only went into saturation mode when the story broke, but kept going back to it at a fairly sustained pace until Election Day.

Will anyone in the traditional press corps even allow anyone to mention Obama’s “mis-state-ment” in a month? Will CNN’s John Roberts add “no 57-state zone” to his “Wright-free zone“?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Townhall.com:

Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let’s look at some environmentalist predictions that they would prefer we forget.

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore’s hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and “in the 1970s … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were gloomier: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book “The Doomsday Book,” said Americans were using 50 percent of the world’s resources and “by 2000 they [Americans] will, if permitted, be using all of them.” In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, “The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000.”

Harvard University biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, “… civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” That was the same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine, that by 1995 “… somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

It’s not just latter-day doomsayers who have been wrong; doomsayers have always been wrong. In 1885, the U.S. Geological Survey announced there was “little or no chance” of oil being discovered in California, and a few years later they said the same about Kansas and Texas.

But we should trust the alarmists’ descendants today, because they now have Nobel Prizes, and government contracts, and cushy jobs at NASA. Oh, and Old Media treats what they say as accepted wisdom. (/sarc).

From Caledonia, Michigan via the UK Daily Mail:

Last updated at 22:55pm on 2nd May 2008

How many people can explain what it feels like to listen to their own funeral service?
Well, 21-year-old Whitney Cerak can - although, hardly surprisingly, even she struggles to find the words to do so.

One afternoon last August, she sat beside her father at the family dining table and pressed “play” to hear the definitive summing up of her young life.

More than 1,400 people had packed into the church, in the American town of Caledonia, Michigan, to say goodbye to her in 2006, and the proceedings had been recorded. No one could have dreamed that one day Whitney herself would be able to listen to their tributes.

“I can barely describe how it felt,” she says. “Odd. Weird. Surreal. A bit scary. I’m the only person I know who has listened to their own funeral.

“It was as if they were talking about someone else. People were saying wonderful things about me - about how I had touched their lives. I thought, ‘All this? For me?’. That bit was humbling.

“But mostly I found it upsetting. To hear the eulogy, my dad’s voice, my sister talking about all the parts of her life that I wasn’t going to share - that was hard. I don’t think I will be listening to it again.”

It sounds like the implausible plot of some cheap soap opera, but what happened to Whitney Cerak and her family was all too real.

She found herself at the centre of one of the most astonishing cases of mistaken identity ever, when she was wrongly named as the dead victim of a terrible road accident.

Four students and one teacher were involved in the collision in the town of Fort Worth, in April 2006. Five died at the scene and the only survivor - a pretty blonde girl who was discovered unconscious with serious head injuries - was identified as 22-year-old Laura Van Ryn, partly because Laura’s purse was found next to her.

The badly injured girl was not Laura, however, but Whitney, who was then just days from her 19th birthday.

It was the sort of mistake that would normally be picked up quickly, at least as soon as relatives were involved, but in this case, it wasn’t.

The Van Ryn family - summoned to what they were told was their critically-ill daughter’s bedside - were warned they might be shocked by her appearance and not to expect to recognise her.

There were bandages on her head, and her features were terribly swollen. Not once did they actually question her identity - but, in the circumstances, what family would?

Similarly, the Cerak family, who had been told their daughter was dead, were too deep in grief to question anything. Because of the nature of her injuries, they declined to see Whitney’s body, preferring to remember her as she was.

Unwittingly, then, both families were set on a terrible course, each accepting a fate that was simply not theirs.

What happened next is still unthinkable. For an incredible five weeks, the Van Ryn family kept a vigil over Whitney (whom they believed to be their daughter Laura), willing her to emerge from her coma.

They held her hand, told her repeatedly that they loved her, and willed her to come back to them. They tracked every tiny step in her recovery with jubilant updates on a family internet “blog”, encouraging everyone to pray for her.

Meanwhile, the Cerak family got on with the terrible business of grieving. They buried “Whitney” (though it was of course Laura), filling the church with her favourite gerbera flowers, and having her friends create posters in celebration of her young life.

These and the order of service and hundreds of sympathy cards they received were put away in a drawer for posterity. Little did they realise, their daughter would one day be able to see them for herself.

Had anyone been looking for them, there were hints in that hospital that all was not as it seemed.

“Laura”, by now conscious, was behaving oddly and calling out strange names.

Staggeringly, though, the truth only came to light when she was asked to write down her own name on a piece of paper. She managed just one chilling word: ‘W-h-i-t-n-e-y.’ …..

Go here for the rest of the story.