✒What better way to end the year than with 2012's worst or most comical media blunders? The Poynter Institute's Regret the Error, a US-based but international correction-compiling site, picks as error of the year the initial misreporting by CNN and Fox News of the supreme court judgment on "Obama-care", and as apology of the year the Sun's front page apology to the Liverpool fans it accused 23 years ago over the Hillsborough disaster.
✒More fun, though, are the typo of the year, awarded to the Charlotte Observer for describing a basketball player as "recovering from a herniated dick"; and photo error of the year, a barely believable accidental use by a Denver TV station of a doctored cover of Paula Broadwell's biography of David Petraeus – real title All In, but altered to read All Up In My Snatch – to illustrate a report on their affair.
✒The Economist's correction of a piece saying Bloomberg Businessweek journalists could be disciplined for spritzer-sipping ("This is not true. Sorry. We must have been drunk on the job") also raises a smile, but can it really be the correction of the year? The Guardian could surely produce a stronger contender than that, and it was unfortunate that last Friday's effort – "a review of Scott Walker's latest album referred to a track as SDSS14+3B (Zircon, A Flagpole Sittter). That should of course have been SDSS1416 + 13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)" – appeared too late to come into the reckoning.
✒Harding's fall was so unexpected might explain why the grieving coverage of his resignation in his own paper (mocked by the Telegraph's Peter Oborne as appropriate to a cabinet minister, not a journalist) was so extensive and prominent. And why Times columnist Giles Coren, hitherto surprisingly emollient by his own standards, made a convincing late bid for the Twitter rant of the year: "I am gutted about @hardingthehack, the best editor I ever worked for. The Times has fucked itself in the arse. Merry fucking Christmas."
✒What's the secret of Mail Online, generally recognised as once again the media brand of the year? Some clues can be gleaned from Monkey's unique unofficial chart of the tags most used in 2012 in the site's peerless celebrity coverage. Sterling work was again done by "nip-slip" (40 search results, 10th place), but it was overtaken by "side-boob" (89, 9th), the rising star of online peekaboo which already has its own site on HuffPo. More disappointing was the so-so performance of "leaves little/nothing to the imagination" (115, 8th), a personal favourite of Monkey's since it implies that Mail readers, and of course editors, have to devote a lot of time to imagining what lies beneath less revealing outfits.
✒After "sexy swimwear" (117, 7th), the figures jump in recognition of the irresistible clickability of "wardrobe malfunction" (276, 6th), "barely there" (295, 5th), "scantily clad" (425, 4th), and "see-through" (653, 3rd). In the battle to be No 1, the splendidly old-fashioned "shows off her curves" (737, 2nd) remains a credible challenger, but easily the biggest triggers for mass arousal in Middle England turn out to be "plunging" (1,421) dresses and necklines.
✒And what about those scantily clad stars? Excluding royals, Mail Online loves, in ascending order, Kristen Stewart, Kate Moss, Beyoncé, Tulisa, Britney and Cheryl Cole, with Victoria Beckham in 4th place and David in 3rd. With a spectacular 1,365 appearances in the year to date, Rihanna could have been forgiven for counting on victory; but instead Monkey's in-depth analysis suggests it was seized by Kim Kardashian (1,432), who is all but invisible on British TV and probably unknown to around 90% of the Mail's print readership. That Paul Dacre has long had a tortuous love/hate relationship with Rihanna is well-known, but whether he could even name a single Kardashian sister remains unclear.
