Profiles in Media Cluelessness

It's not clear which was more laughable, the cluelessness on display or the hapless effort to hide the cluelessness on display. The Scrapbook is referring to the embarrassing story that went up on the snarky Mediaite website (sort of a cross between the Huffington Post and Gawker) during game seven of the World Series. Mediaite senior writer Josh Feldman posted on the site a breathless headline: "Wait, What's That KKK Sign Doing at the World Series?"

Feldman hyperventilated: "It sure looked like there was a KKK sign somewhere at the Cubs-Indians Game 7 tonight." The writer hadn't seen the signs himself but was relying on a Twitter tizzy: "Nobody seen that kkk sign near the Cleveland stands???" tweeted one outraged viewer. "Bruh somebody got a KKK sign at the world series," tweeted another. Feldman spotted the tweets and thought he had himself a scoop about the racism pervasive in Amerikkka.

Of course, as even many non-baseball fans are aware, "K" is the symbol used to mark a strikeout when scoring a baseball game. (The K is written backwards if the batter takes the third strike looking.) Fans regularly hang "K" placards from the stands to celebrate each strikeout their pitchers throw as the game goes along. After three strikeouts, one of course sees three Ks on display. KKK, in the real America, means decent pitching, not indecent racial animus.

Which returns us to the laughable and pathetic cluelessness of Feldman, who seems never to have seen a baseball game. Readers who did know a little about the game quickly scored Feldman's play an error. Which is when the hapless effort to hide the cluelessness came into play. The byline suddenly became "Mediaite Staff." The headline was quickly changed to read "Some Twitterers Thought There Was a KKK Sign at the World Series." Yes, and their ignorant tweets had been showcased and highlighted by Mediaite.

The site did provide an "update," which drily noted that the original post had "been updated to reflect the fact that it was NOT a KKK sign, it was signifying the number of strikeouts."