today's sunday star features dennis ryerson's mea culpa about that royal screw-up on last saturday's front page:

Aweek ago a headline at the top of our front page was clear and to the ipoint: "Physicians lose child abuse suit." A secondary headline added that: "Plaintiff awarded $400,000 in case alleging doctors didn't report abuse."

Unfortunately, the main headline, as was the story under it, was as inaccurate as it was clear. A jury held Methodist Hospital responsible for not identifying and reporting suspected abuse of an 11-month-old child who was returned to his mother and later beaten to death by the mother's boyfriend. The jury ruled that the two physicians involved in the case, Dr. Gary Thompson and Dr. Michael Turner, were not liable.

No question, it was a very bad error.

first off, note that the lead sentence in the big apology itself contains two typos! that is so indy star. you couldn't write a more dead-on satire than that.

anyway, the gist of the piece is that yes, this was a snafu of epic proportions, they're not really sure why they messed up so badly (maybe because the verdict was announced right at press time), and they went above-and-beyond to make up for it by running a second front-pager the next day. not exactly encouraging, though i am glad for that last part.

you might recall that when i blogged about this story last week, i said i was getting my hands on a paper copy of the issue in question and scanning it. i do have that newspaper, but haven't gotten around to scanning it because i've been trying to hit a right deadline for work. right now i'm getting ready to see tosca, but i might have time to scan it tonight. ¶

this is like a comedy of errors though they can't stop while they are ahead... MadTV had a hilarious bit on Apple (actually about Iraq or irack as they called it) that renamed a bunch of common appliances- imicrowave, ishelf, etc...perhaps the ipoint? ¶