The New York Post’s Boston Marathon coverage was heinous. It ID’d the wrong men — two dark-skinned men, shocker — as the possible bombers, on the front page, causing these innocents fathomless pain and stress. And the the Post refused to back down.

One of the non-bombers, who immediately ran to the courthouse to clear his name, later told ABC News, “It’s the worst feeling that I can possibly feel. I’m only 17.” He turned out to be an all-star track athlete at Revere High School, not a terrorist. And his backpack wasn’t even the same color as those seen in surveillance photos. Oops.) The Post also kept insisting, even as almost every other outlet was claiming that there were two deaths (which was all that was known in the first few terrifying hours on Monday) that there were 12. Again, the Post stuck by that story as long as possible, then changed the number quietly and without apology. The Post (which is part of the same media conglomerate as Fox News) also wrote that a “Saudi national” was under arrest — way to whip up still more anti-Muslim, anti-Arab froth.

On Thursday AM, the Post issued a statement about accusing innocents on its front page: “We stand by our story. The image was emailed to law enforcement agencies yesterday afternoon seeking information about these men, as our story reported. We did not identify them as suspects.” Hair-splitting, Col! Allan’s weasel response prompted Gawker to run a story headlined, “Is the New York Post Edited by a Bigoted Drunk Who Fucks Pigs?” Gawker alluded to theories that Post editor Col Allan was a racist person with a history of incidents of drunkenness, but did not out-and-out SAY that he was a racist person with a history of incidents of drunkenness. Gawker concluded:

Perhaps the worthlessness of every single scoop the Post has had—its inability even to get the body count straight—does not prove that the editor is a booze-addled, race-baiting, information-illiterate moron who has neither the common sense nor the journalistic skills to avoid repeatedly humiliating his newspaper.

We would not say that, any more than we would say that Col Allan fucks pigs. He is from Australia; if he were to engage in bestiality, it’s much more likely that it would be with sheep. But we are not saying Col Allan fucks sheep, either. It could be that Col Allan fucks pigs or sheep. We do not know. It would be irresponsible to speculate.

Indeed.

As of late as yesterday, Allan was still maintaining that the Post did a good job. He tweeted: “All NYPost pics were those distributed by FBI. And instantly withdrawn when FBI changed directions.” (Besides, as Vanity Fair pointed out, the Post was right about some things! The Boston Marathon does, indeed, take place in Boston! Participants in the Boston Marathon are, indeed, colloquially referred to as “runners”!) The Onion, too, weighed in with a “commentary” from “Col Allan,” entitled “This Is A Tragedy — Does It Really Matter Exactly How Many People Died Or What Any Of The Details Are?” pointing out the fallacy of getting “hung up” on “facts” at “a time like this.”)

Given Allan’s rigidity (in a philosophical sense, not in a sexual sense, which would make sense given what we know about the physiology of drunks, not that I am accusing Allan of being a drunk), the performance-art-oriented media collective Animal decided to do The Post’s apologizing in its stead. They typed up an apology on fake Post letterhead and inserted it into thousands of papers, which it then distributed. 

Le voila.

Here’s Animal’s fake apology. Which is excellent, according to our own apology-excellence rubric. If the Post every DOES decide to apologize (AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA) they could do worse than to simply copy this.

 The only thing we’d like to see in a real apology would be a plan for making sure such errors don’t occur again. What would Real-Life-Col do to make amends, other than apologizing? Would he reevaluate the way the Post covers stories, calling together the paper’s staff to convey a new philosophy of not going off half-cocked (again, in a journalistic sense) and instituting a system of say, waiting for confirmation from three sources before publishing something, and issuing corrections in a timely fashion? Would Real-Life-Col promise from here on out to apologize personally, as well as in print, to those it wronged, like this kid? Would the Post make a donation to an organization that helps those who have been wrongly accused, like, say The Innocence Project? (Oh, I crack myself up.)