White Sox Play Where? National Media Scores a Hat Trick Ignoring the South Siders

CHICAGO, IL — This sounds like a story from the Bible: "By the time the World Series begins, National News Media, you will deny three times that you ever knew the Chicago White Sox played in a World Series."

That certainly proved to be the case earlier this week when at least three major national news outlets seemed to be oblivious to the fact that Chicago is home to two Major League Baseball teams. What does a major sports franchise have to do to get attention? Win three World Series?¹

Let's take a look at the three media organizations that played the role of Peter and denied the existence of the Chicago White Sox in this baseball Passion Play.

The Washington Post

The newspaper that was immortalized in the movie "All the President's Men" probably made the least egregious error of omission when it comes to the White Sox. As a preview to the World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians, the Post featured the Boston Red Sox, another team, like the two in this year's series, that had an agonizing drought between World Series victories. The Red Sox went 86 years — from 1918 until 2004 — without winning the Fall Classic. That's a miserable span that only the fans of the Cubs or Indians could appreciate.

Or fans of the White Sox fans, who went 88 years without knowing the glory of being called World Series champions.

But Chicagoans forgive you, Washington Post. Next time, though, assign your top reporters to a story like this. What are Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford up to?

"CBS This Morning"

It's amazing how much you can get wrong in only 140 characters. And it looked like the person running the Twitter account for this network morning news show was trying to go for a record with this tweet:

An apology was posted more than three hours later to acknowledge the Sox's 2005 World Series win. But it did ignore the team's 1959 appearance.

While it's understandable that the show didn't run down the White Sox's entire championship résumé, it is a bit perplexing that it took so long to correct the mistake. What newsworthy tweets were causing the delay?

Ah, Phil Collins updates with misspellings in them.²

ESPN

If there was one place that wouldn't ignore the White Sox's October achievements, it would be the Worldwide Leader in Sports. But alas, even ESPN let South Siders down. And cable's 24-hour sports news channel did it with a full-color graphic to boot:

Like "CBS This Morning," sportscaster Max Bretos went to Twitter to apologize for the gaffe. And he even threw in a peace offering to fans:

FOOTNOTES

¹Those World Series titles were in 1906, 1917 and 2005.

²By pointing out another news organization's spelling mistakes and typos I have guaranteed that this piece is littered with errors.

The Chicago White Sox celebrate their World Series win in 2005 with a city parade. (photo by theadamant via Flickr | Wikimedia Commons)

Like What You're Reading? Stay Patched In!

• Like our Crime page on Facebook
• Live Traffic and Transit Updates