Mainichi clueless about internet – runs article blaming Wikipedia user for murders

Thanks to Helical for reporting this development in the comment section of today’s post about the murders targeting Health Ministry bureaucrats:

Hot on the heels of the actual murder, Mainichi has committed a colossal flop regarding this case.

They ran an article in the morning edition, claiming that the attacks were declared beforehand on Wikipedia, speculating that it was yet another case of netizens announcing crimes on the Net.
Their reason was that the name of the assassinated minister was annotated as being assassinated on the wikipedia, and the timestamp was apparently before the actual crime. They even claimed police were investigating connections.

Except there’s one catch.

The Wikipedia article edit timestamp was in GMT, not JST (GMT +9:00).

The edit was about 3 hours after the crime, but Mainichi assumed it was 6 hours *before* the stabbing, and jumped the gun.

As soon as it was published on the web, 2-channelers caught on to the flub and the big lulz started, and Mainichi pulled the web article but couldn’t stop the presses, and this wound up on the morning edition.

Mainichi’s Osaka edition even included the name of the Wikipedia editor, Popons, in their headline:

And morning TV shows failed to check the facts before reporting the printed Mainichi articles as truth:

Mainichi has since placed a short apology on their website, and an evening edition of the print edition contained an article that made a correction while apparently placing some of the blame on the Wikipedia editor. While Popons may have used the term “assassination” and accidentally written that a bureaucrat was killed when it was in fact his wife who was attacked, that’s no excuse for Mainichi to confuse time zones and run a sensational piece about Wikipedia editors supposedly killing people.

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