From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. It's a new year and as glad tidings fade, what's left are hangovers, especially for sloppy journalists.

Craig Silberman is the creator of Regret the Error error.com and he joins us once again with his annual

list of media mistakes. The known blunders have finally reached critical mass because he says in 2009,

the big thing was calling BS, also known as fact checking. Oftentimes when there are layoffs at a magazine, the fact-checkers are

usually the first people to go because they look at their staff and they say, well, you sort

of check other people's work, you don't actually produce reporting. But what's going on is that

fact-checking is becoming kind of a sport now. And everybody from pundits to people in the public

are all engaging in fact-checking and trying to call BS on each other.

And there were just a lot of examples of it this year.

A website, PolitiFact, they're a fact-checking organization, won a Pulitzer.

And then, of course, there's The Daily Show, which has really taken up a lot of fact-checking.

We've talked about the disappearance of the of fact-checking. We've talked about the disappearance of the professional

fact-checker. Well, the Daily Show actually has one on staff, so they seem to be picking up the slack.

Okay, let's get down to business. What was the error of the year? The error is called Wafergate,

because back in July, a Canadian newspaper, the Telegraph Journal reported that the Prime Minister of Canada, when he was taking

communion at a church, that he had taken the wafer, which represents the body of Christ, and placed it in his pocket.

And the newspaper ran a front page story. They had quotes from a very senior priest in the area saying that this was an outrage,

and basically it turned into a national scandal.

It didn't have any evidence that he had placed it in his pocket. The accusations were inserted

at some point in the editorial process after the reporters had actually filed the story.

And in fact, those quotes from the priest saying this was a scandal were pretty much fabricated

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