There are perils for today’s journalists. There is a special peril for journalists that suffer from PDS (Palin Derangement Syndrome).

A few days ago the Daily Currant ran a “newsflash” with the title

”Sarah Palin to Join Al Jazeera as Host.”

The next few news flashes read:

Glenn Beck Calls 911 After Accidentally Eating Halal Pizza.

Vladimir Putin Kills Grizzly Bear With Bare Hands.

Catholic Church Considering Jerry Sandusky as Next Pope.

Obama to Declare America a ‘Socialist State’

This ought to have given anyone pause to think. Maybe these stories are satirical?

Nah, the Washington Post journalist Suzi Parker, famous for her book “Sex in the South: Unbuckling the Bible Belt.”, because of her PDS swallowed the story, hook line and sinker, and published the whole article eight days later as a result of her own research.

 The editor, Melina Henneberger, also suffering from PDS didn’t bother to check the sources either, so it was published. in the on-line edition of the Washington Post.

The line that made them both fall for it was probably the quote “As you all know, I’m not a big fan of newspapers, journalists, news anchors and the liberal media in general,” Palin said. “But I met with the folks at Al-JaJizzraa (sic) and they told me they reach millions of devoutly religious people who don’t watch CBS or CNN. That tells me they don’t have a liberal bias.”

A few hours later somebody pointed out the error and got the following voice-mail reply from the Washington Post ombudsman:

 “Hi, this is Patrick Pexton. I’m the ombudsman for the Washington Post. You called about the Sarah Palin mistaken story, um, yes, you are correct, that was based on a satiric website, ‘The Daily Current(sic).’ She totally missed that. Uh, shame on us. It was corrected within an hour or two later, uh, and a corrected version is online. That was a terrible mistake, I agree with you. It got through one editor, obviously the writer made the mistake and it got through one Post editor. So, shame on us–anyway–thanks for calling. Bye.”

The corrected retraction read as follows:

Sarah Palin tries to stay relevant

CORRECTION:  An earlier version of this post and the post’s URL incorrectly reported that Sarah Palin had signed on as a contributor to the Al Jazeera America news network. The blogger cited a report on the Daily Currant Web site as the basis for that information without realizing that the piece was satirical. 

But the rest of the article derading Sarah Palin was left intact.

So, at that point Suzi Parker had already been given her two week notice and was no longer a journalist with Washington Post, but given her newfound role: Blogger.

PDS does funny things to people. I am still waiting for their official apology to Sarah Palin. In the mean-time:

Irrelevant people, unite!

The LSM Post gets our spite.

The Tea Party’s growing

A sentiment brewing:

Tell Washington Post, Fly a kite!