The Puerto Rican “BanderaGate” Follow-Up: New York Daily News Corrects Ad and Prints Retraction

By:
Jun 8, 2012
2:17 PM

So, within 24 hours, here is what happened:

  1. An image gets uploaded on Facebook around lunch time. We call The New York Daily News. They respond. We break the story online.
  2. The reaction goes viral.
  3. The Puerto Rican press picks it up around 3pm EST.
  4. We contact the newspaper again and they give us a statement. The apology gets tweeted.
  5. Our story gets picked up by The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Remezcla, Voxxi, and several bloggers.
  6. The ad gets corrected and published today, along with a retraction on page 2 that pokes a bit of fun of the whole situation.

And here is the corrected ad:

Ironically, this whole gaffe is exactly 10 years from the month when The Daily News' "Viva New York," the same supplement that published the incorrect ad yesterday published this winner that defies basic journalistic instinct: in a section on Puerto Rican history, the paper used El Morro fro m Havana, Cuba instead of El Morro from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Ouch. (Thanks to José Rafael Méndez who found the cover and posted it on our wall.)