I noticed a Wired post titled "Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone" scooted to the top of the "popular today" stories on popurls. With a linkbait-laden, controversy-attracting title like that, it had better! The article was written by Brian X. Chen, whose surname some commenters predictably assumed to be Chinese, evoking racial tensions between Japanese vs. Chinese. One dubious fellow who dubbed himself "hehe" declared:

Hello, My name is Brian X. Chen and as an American-born Chinese I think life is really unfair. First, Asian American women won't date me. That really makes me angry. When I see an Asian American woman with a white guy, it hurts me deep inside. And as a Chinese, I hate Japan. Japan. Japan. Japan. Japan. It's all you Internet webus ever talk about. Japanese Electronics. Anime. Japanese porn. Japanese women. I'm really sick of it you know.

Many commenters derided the article as being over-simplistic, and a few moar trolls stepped in to impersonate Chen. Of course it slid downhill from there, for crying out loud!

What's more, Daiji Hirata claims he was misquoted alongside another source, Nobi, and you know how much I hate when fæces like that goes to town:

I have never said "And carrying around an iPhone in Japan could make you look pretty lame." I feel many Japanese think iPhone is one of the coolest phone. I have iPhone, too.

I have never met the author.

Ouch! Burned!

Eventually, the comments were unceremoniously closed without an official reply from Brian X. Chen or anyone else from Wired (so far). I don't know much about "journalistic integrity", but that definitely ain't communication. I read Wired regularly and perhaps there's giggles over the traffic they're getting (do a Ballard-Cronenberg and humans will look!), but impressive followup this is not.

There were many dirty faces in the comments, but that doesn't excuse Brian from stepping above it all and clarifying the situation. It's another one of those events where stupid "leap before looking" takes over, like having only one frame of a video's entire context, like accusing Woz of cutting in line.

What would be the right thing to do here? It's simple: earnestly admit you screwed up and move on.

Saying something is better than trying to sweep it under the rug, because the Internet has lots of gladdicted people who notice, and I'm one of them.

[UPDATE] Glad to see other bloggers speaking up about this, iPhonAsia and MacDailyNews among them. The reddit and Digg peanut galleries are in full effect, too.

[UPDATE 2] Yes, I know what Twitter search can find. No, it's not obvious enough for most, and bxchen's response and acknowledging the edit should be in, or linked to the original post that set it all off.