Equal time

The Nation's Newspaper of Record is pretty good at pointing out when some blunder or another has occurred "because of an editing error." Not that every case has to have some equal apportionment of  blame or anything, but sometimes it'd be nice to know what the equivalent of "because of an editing error" is in real money -- say, when it comes to making up a quote:

An article last Sunday about college students who live close to home quoted incorrectly from comments by Scotti Parrish, one of the parents interviewed. Dr. Parrish, who teaches at the University of Michigan, said: “I stay home, for instance, on St. Patrick’s Day. I don’t want to see my students vomiting in an alley.” She did not say, “I don’t want to see my students, much less my own kids, vomiting in an alleyway."

Because if there's some sort of systematic error that we can identify when it comes to fabricating stuff at random, it seems that might be pretty useful stuff to know the next time we're on the brink of an illegal war of aggression or something.