Alex Johnson – Journalist at Large

Jim Davis wants you to know that he really, really — really — regrets yesterday’s “Garfield” strip, which some people thought might be offensive to veterans.

That’s “Garfield” — representative of all that’s safe and bland in the comics world — and “offensive to veterans” in the same sentence.

If that seems unlikely, there’s a reason. It turns out the strip offended nearly no one, veterans included. All it did was create a manufactured mini-controversy based on journalists’ assumptions that it would — substantiating my hypothesis that we’re frequently skipping basic reporting steps in our eagerness to stay up to Web speed.

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