A friend of mine sent me a link to a Salon story titled A Taste of North Korean Beer Propaganda, which is centered around a bizarre claim that North Korea’s beer brand, Taedonggang, has a picture of a historically significant American schooner on its cap.
One does not even have to read Korean to work out that Taedonggang is named after the Taedong River — it’s mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the beer — and from there, it’s not hard to do a little Googling and find out that the picture on the bottle cap is of the Chongryu Bridge, which crosses the Taedong in Pyongyang.
Why Salon so completely missed this is beyond me. It smacks of pure laziness. I expect we’ll be hearing from them any day about the Marlboro-KKK connection.
Salon has posted the correction. But even more interesting, they’ve linked to the original blog entry, where the author has noted the correction, but also explains how the mistake was made: http://populargusts.blogspot.com/2008/03/lack-of-perspective.html