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Writing on TheDailyBeast (where I also have a column), Christopher Buckley points out an interesting correction from The Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. budget deficit is projected to total $1.2 trillion this year. A page-one World-Wide news summary in some editions Jan. 8 incorrectly put the figure at $1.2 billion.

Oops! The difference is only a factor of 1,000 but once you get over the $700 billion mark, does it really even matter? And since we're just going to be printing the money anyway -- we certainly don't have it sitting around -- and foisting the bill on future generations, who cares?

But that got me thinking: How many other brilliant newspaper errors have there been? It turns out that there's an entire website devoted to them. Log-on to Regret The Error and check out their best corrections of 2008. The best correction of the year goes to The Daily Mail:

In articles published on 23 and 26 May 2008, we gave the impression that Mr Gest had contracted a sexually transmitted infection and alleged that he had Liza Minnelli's dog killed without her knowledge. This was wrong. David Gest has never had a sexually transmitted infection and did not have Ms Minnelli's dog killed. We apologise to Mr Gest for any embarrassment caused.

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A billion? A trillion? What's the difference? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 16 Jan 2009 14:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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