Contact with the motherland - disappointment, not surprise

An interesting clipping from the Feb. 18 issue of USA Today has been making the rounds of several East European weblogs:


What's wrong with this picture? The country labeled on the map as "Slovakia" is actually Slovenia. It's easy to have a field day with this because it echoes the apparently multiple occasions on which President Bush has confused the two countries(the gaffe is mentioned but buried in all three of the linked articles).

We have it on the authority of the Slovak Spectator that this map is not a hoax designed to make Americans look ignorant, it's the real deal.

The fact that this would happen in USA Today - a paper that my high school girlfriend (and editor back in the day at Young DC newspaper) used to always refer to as McPaper, although I'm sure that wasn't her coinage - is disappointing because the paper has such wide circulation, but it's not a surprise because of the paper's generally low production values. If it's any reassurance to my non-US readers, no member of the US intelligentsia (if you're willing to acknowledge such a thing exists) would put much stock in anything they see in USA Today. Not that most of them could find Slovakia on a map, but they might look it up if they were assigned to do a newspaper graphic on it.

Will US bloggers focus on this like they did on the comments made at Davos by CNN's Eason Jordan which eventually got him fired? Is some poor map designer about to get tossed from his cubicle at Gannett headquarters? I doubt it - remember, Jordan's comments were offensive to conservative American bloggers because he impugned the honor of the US military (and I do agree that his throwing assumptions around as fact in a public forum should have been a firing offense), whereas this map boo-boo was just an honest, albeit careless mistake - unfortunately, it's one which has allowed a lot of non-Americans to reinforce their opinion of Americans as self-centered and ignorant of the rest of the world.

Note that USA Today did issue a correction in the issue of the paper immediately following the one in which the incorrect graphic ran (I know this thanks to a helpful comment made by one Owen V. Johnson on the Slovak Spectator article linked to above); however, the online version of the correction does not have the corrected map graphic. Presumably it was there in the print version.