adrian holovaty

March 14, 2003, 11:30 AM ET

Dallasnews.com: Caught red-handed

Spotted about 45 minutes ago on the home page of the Dallas (Texas) Morning News (note the caption):

Not only is the photo overly distorted; the caption is flat-out incorrect. The young boy on the left side of the photo is not Brian David Mitchell, the man who is suspected of kidnapping Elizabeth Smart. The young boy is Elizabeth's brother, William.

This photo was live on the dallasnews.com home page for about five minutes. It might've been longer; it had already been there when I first loaded the site at 9:46 a.m. Central Standard Time. I shift-reloaded several times during those five minutes, to make sure the photo wasn't sitting in my browser's cache.

If dallasnews.com's traffic patterns are anywhere near those of a typical news site, that incorrect caption was published smack-dab in the middle of the site's daily traffic peak -- the start of the business day. It's safe to say tens of thousands of people saw it. Some might have laughed, some might have gasped. Others might have let out a cry of disgust and announced it to their fellow coworkers as "the worst home page photo ever" -- like the guy who sits next to me at work, who alerted all of us here in Lawrence, Kansas.

The dallasnews.com staff corrected the photo after a few minutes. But there is no mention of the mistake on either the home page or corrections page.

When a newspaper publishes an incorrect caption, it makes an effort to publish a correction the next day, in the name of restoring its credibility. When a news Web site publishes an incorrect caption, it shoves its mistake under the rug as soon as it can.