Reddit.com is one of my favorite sites. If you haven’t check it out yet, do so. So, I was looking at it today and found this story: Here are the photos of the CNN Closed Captioning.

It’s not every day that closed captioning is a story on Reddit’s front page, so off I clicked, and found these images.

Apparently, the captionist accidentally typed “Al Qaeda” when it should read “Hillary Clinton.” As is the immutable nature of the internets, a firestorm ensued in the comments section on both DemocraticUnderground and Reddit, with dozens accusing the captionist and CNN of bias.

One self-righteous commenter wrote:

I could *perhaps* forgive “Osama” if “Obama” was meant. As a proofreader, I know that shit happens. But how can you explain typing in, correctly, Al Quada, if you meant HRC? Somebody was trying to be either malicious or “funny,” and my money is on the former rather than the latter.

This, combined with MSNBC’s “accidental” display of a photo of Osama bin Laden while Tweety was talking about Obama is just too frigging coincidental and inexcusable.

Media have lost ALL credibility now. And it’s only gonna get worse should Obama win the nomination. Guaranteed.

Please. Thankfully, there are some rational people out there, who responded with reason.

but if you knew anything about the process and what captioners have to do, and how good they really are at what they do, you’d know it wsn’t intentional. The best captioner in the world doesn’t have the ability to know ahead of time what a person is going to say and think up something witty and devilish like that, in less than a fraction of a second, and make it flow with the rest of what a person said.

It’s impossible.

And from AnteChronos on Reddit:

They actually use a stenotype machine hooked up to a computer. It converts the phonetic information they type into readable text. The problem is with proper nouns, which require special dictionary entries. Those entries may not even be completely phonetic based on the word being used, to avoid collisions with possible homophones. A good stenocaptioner will have hundreds (or even thousands, depending on what they’re going to be captioning) of personalized shortcuts memorized.

It’s easy to imagine that a sudden “brain fart” could cause the captioner to hit the wrong chord on the stenotype machine. Especially if the custom dictionary isn’t being strictly phonetic. Also, I’d imagine that a captioner for a huge media outlet like CNN would have a huge number of shortcuts. The names of all of the presidential candidates; congress-critters; supreme court justices; US states and major cities; foreign countries, capitals, and major cities; foreign heads of state and dignitaries; major historical people and events; major corporations and organizations; etc. Frankly, I’m astonished that this type of thing doesn’t happen more often.

If you clicked on that link to AnteChronos’ comment, you’ll see another one bringing up Hanlon’s Razor. Essentially, it is a truism which reads: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

That’s an important point to remember, and Hanlon’s Razor can be applied to so many situations. I sometimes wonder if we, as marginalized people, are far more quick to accuse people of oppressive or malicious actions when, in reality, the offenders are just being stupid. Gallaudet. AGBell. Captionists. The VR counselor. The list goes on.

In any case, it’s funny to see hearing people work themselves into a tizzy over a closed captioning typo–something we deal with on a daily basis. Nothing to see here, people. Move along.