Yesterday I posted on TIME magazine’s rather blatant ripoff of MAD magazine’s cover art in which the White House is morphed into the Kremlin (actually, it is St. Basil’s Cathedral which is not part of the Kremlin, but close enough for everyone to get the message.) Banal, unimaginative, and derivative are one thing. CNN has crossed into the blindingly stupid.

No. Those are not minarets. They are onion domes:

This feature is associated with Russian Orthodox churches but if you spent time in Bavaria you know it is very common to find the same feature on Catholic churches there as well as in other areas of Central Europe.

This is a minaret:

It is a tower associated with a mosque and is used for the various calls to prayer.

One can’t help but notice the crosses were also removed from the onion domes but that is not CNN’s doing… they probably wouldn’t have known what they meant anyway.

This goes to what Michael Crichton referred to as the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect:

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

We have a news organization that is seemingly unaware that Russia is not Muslim, otherwise they would not have used the term “minaret,” or that the most famous Orthodox cathedral in the world is not a mosque and yet we are supposed to believe their reporting on other things.