Where do they find these people?

Weekly Standard senior editor Andrew Ferguson opened his Washington Post Outlook piece on Sunday by asserting there are no footnotes in Al Gore’s book The Assault on Reason:

You can’t really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, “The Assault on Reason.” It’s a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I’d love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.

“[L]ike trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver”? In fact, as Bob Somerby and Eric Boehlert point out, the book has endnotes, not footnotes. Did Ferguson open the book? How could he not know this?

In the world of the Post, such a colossal mistake results in this one-sentence correction a couple days of later:

Andrew Ferguson’s June 10 Outlook article, “What Al Wishes Abe Said,” said that former vice president Al Gore’s book “The Assault on Reason” does not contain footnotes. The book contains 20 pages of endnotes.

In his piece, Ferguson goes on to make a seemingly persuasive case that the Lincoln quote Gore uses on page 88 is bogus. But how much trust can we place in someone who can’t find 20 pages of endnotes in a 320 page book? They’re listed in the table of contents! I can even look up the exact citation that Gore uses on Amazon Inside the Book. In a profession other than opinion journalism, this kind of sloppiness would destroy your career.