This week, the Telegraph had a particularly ridiculous bureaucratic run-in with the advance folks for the Obama visit to Washington: they sent advance folks to talk to scores of teen-agers at Nashua High School South, where Obama later appeared - but then told us that we couldn’t report on anything at the event because it was “off the record”! The idea of keeping a lid on a meeting with a roomful of texting teens was so funny that we wrote a story about it, only to be told the next day that … well, I’ll let you read the wonderful correction that we wrote, chuckling the whole time:

“A story on Page 1 of Tuesday’s Telegraph quoted a White House official explaining that a Q-and-A session with dozens of teenagers in Nashua High School North on Monday was “off the record.” However, the explanation about the talk being “off the record” was, it turns out, also “off the record” and should not have been quoted.”

I liked it so much I sent it to RegretTheError, where it was seen by BoingBoing, which is usually a clever and witty site. But for some reason the readers went humor-deaf and went into tut-tutting mainstream media mode, which is the default reaction at too many online sites. Ah, well - it still makes me smile.

(Addendum: Gawker also picked it up  - copying BoingBoing’s copying of RegretTheError in the funhouse mirror effect of the Internet - and then hugged with an even more tone-deaf “media are morons” note.)