Paper Trail

I'm not in the habit of reading the National Post, but then I'm not in the habit of reading any daily newspaper; they're too depressingly bad. But I was waiting for the bus to work (no car for me!) and eyeballing through the window of the newspaper-box the front page of the Post, specifically a story about Harriet Miers' decision to withdraw from the nomination for Supreme Court justice, and there, above the fold, was the second paragraph of the story:

The withdrawl, which comes as the Bush administration is mired in controversy over Iraq....

That's all I jotted down. That's all I needed to. "Withdrawl"? And right there in the third paragraph is the same word, correctly spelled ("withdrawal")?

What's any newspaper saying when it allows such mistakes? "We couldn't be bothered to ensure good spelling and grammar because we don't give a shit about our readers."

And what should any sensible reader take away from such a mistake? "Any newspaper that can't even trouble itself to use a spell-checker is probably not going to employ a fact-checker, either, and it stands to reason that its facts are as suspect as its spelling."