The Misappliance Of Science

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"Back in African-American"... Man, I loved that song.

Debunked: A newspaper once substituted "in the African-American" for "in the black" in a fit of overzealous and unthinking political correctness.

Andrew Steinberg provided the proof that the Fresno Bee seemingly did this very thing on July 19, 1990, with a correction run two days later. But the real kudos go to Peter van der Linden, who tracked down what really happened.

Herb Caen picked up this story when current and made it famous in his column, as an example of computerized correction of politically incorrect speech run amok, and the anti-PC crowd eagerly passed the UL around. However, PvdL, as described here, contacted the paper and eventually uncovered that it was a deliberate prank. The Fresno Bee did not have a list of verboten terms, and they ran no program that would translate one word or phrase into a different word or phrase. It was a manual change.

So while some may try to put a "Political Correctness is Evil!" moral on this story, we actually know that it represents a "Don't believe everything you read in the paper" cautionary tale.

References:

• PvdL does some legwork