As for me, misidentification of African-Americans can range from ignorance to subversive racism. Who's to say it doesn't run the gamut?

I'd imagine they're pretty damn low on the journalism totem pole, relatively speaking.

This reminds me of the time at our student newspaper, at JHU, where Cal Ripken was identified as the Orioles' third-baseman. (He's a shortstop, and in the 1990's he owned that fucking city.) The reason? The layout editor added a caption (that the author didn't realize would be necessary) and the copy editor was a girl who didn't follow baseball. Shit happens.

(Yes, I realize the AP are professionals, not unpaid college kids.)

I mean, at least they got the "Chris", "D[...]Angelo" and "Trailblazer" parts right. It's not like they put a picture of Shaq above a caption for Beyonce'.

monique and tim451 -- Valid points both. And yes, to some extent, I am playing devil's advocate. But if you go to the corrections page, it doesn't look like there is an inordinate number of black people. Perhaps it just general sloppiness, and not particularly disrespecting black men?

However, misidentification of the person in the picture seems to be the domain of black male athletes and celebrities and foreign politicians.

Having worked the photo desk on my college newspaper almost a decade ago, I have to tell you the inaccuracy in photo captions you're seeing on the AP photo wire isn't new. Caption corrections have been been almost as common as photos on the wire for a long, long time. What's new is that Yahoo is here, spitting out the AP photo wire without any form of filtration. So you're getting all the corrections along with the content.

When AP solely served newspapers and other more static media, this wasn't as much of an issue; the caption corrections would most likely come over the wire before the paper was put to bed, the corrections would be made and readers were none the wiser. The Internet has eliminated that time delay, and that in combination with reduced editorial proofing (at least on Yahoo's part) results in more errors making it to print -- or, in this case, to screen.

please don't lump us all into the same category. i always tell people that i'm not a photographer, i'm a photojournalist -- because i pride myself on being as good of a journalist as my wordy counterparts. unfortunately what you have to understand is that after we get back with our pictures, and write our cpations there are still three or four more people that "check" it. i can't tell you how often i've been right, and someone on the copydesk, or some editor in a glass office, assumes i'm wrong because i'm "just a photographer."

yes, there is a lot of sloppiness and a lot of laziness and a lot of things that make it into print that never should, but there's also a lot of really, really good journalism out there that you never get to see.

Come on now - unless you work for yourself or are very lucky - you goto work, you have good days you have bad days, things happen, but in the end, it can be said the same about most - when its all said and done you just do the job, and not really care about the job - be it you do a good job or bad job, they stop paying you, you stop going, which does prove, you just dont care, you only care about your paycheck and a place to live and food to eat - like everybody else, like editors at newspapers, like taco bell people, like aids in the senators office, etc, etc, etc

Also, you have any clue how many words and photos go through AP a day? They are going to have errors if god himself is doing it.