RALF GOERGENS emailed me, upset that I hadn’t responded to an earlier email of his. I had just missed it. Sorry — even a year ago I was kind of keeping afloat, but I’m getting more and more email and now if I’m offline for even a few hours I get hopelessly behind. Usually when people email me angrily about missed emails I just refer ’em to what I say in the FAQs (if I reply at all) but Ralf was actually pointing to a post saying that an item I linked to on German media was way overblown. Anyway, there’s an interesting discussion there in the comments between Ralf and Medienkritik’s David Kaspar, so go read it.

In general, to help minimize this problem, if you’re correcting a factual error, please put something in the subject line — like ERROR CORRECTION — to make that clear. Note that opinions with which you disagree do not constitute factual errors. . . .