You Don’t Have To Share My Religion To Be A Heretic

In this Forbes piece about the busiest actors in Hollywood, Dirk Smillie utters heresy based, no doubt, in ingnorance, but heresy just the same:

Likewise, Christian Bale’s top six movies over the past five years brought in $1 billion, with some 70% of that box-office gold coming from his roles in the Batman series–Dark Knight and Batman Begins. Not every actor who’s played a Marvel character is as lucky, of course. [Emphasis added.]

That’s it, I’m looking for some kindling.

I would have expected the comments on an Internet post of such a mistake to erupt with righteous outrage. However, I might be the only comic book fan who reads Forbes. Certainly, I hold many “only … who reads Forbes” distinctions.

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5 thoughts on “You Don’t Have To Share My Religion To Be A Heretic

  1. You know, I can’t imagine the life of a fact checker. There are so many things within this column or feature to check.

    I do know when I was doing a newspaper column, I was very meticulous in not using asides unless I’d checked my own inclinations and cleverness to make sure I was hitting the money. But I only did a column a quarter with my last gig, so I had time. I wasn’t trying to do 600 words a day or several times a week.

  2. I work in an academic-ish library, and I think that I could do pretty good fact checking with our resources. I have no idea how it would work at a newspaper without those resources.

    I was actually wondering if you had published. You’re a pretty witty writer. Are you still actively publishing? Beyond WordPress and the laundromat bulletin board, I mean.

  3. You flatter me.

    I’ve been on your newstands, brother, both in the History Magazine and in Writer’s Journal, but I’ve not really had the discipline in the last two years to sit down and put anything decent together to try to sell.

  4. And as to how it works at other magazines/newspapers, I’d guess that they used to be written like I wrote those columns or the straight news stories would be written pretty close to the actual topic covered.

    Nowadays, the pop culture references and asides and whatnot are too many to check individually and to get correct on the columnists’ own 100% of the time. And there’s no real sanction for failure.

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