A bunch of bloggers are disappointed that, while reporting today's events in the Washington sniper story, MSNBC originally couldn't find Alabama on an unmarked US map. It'd be easy to condemn MSNBC, or the US educational system, or the East Coast/West Coast elitism of American education and American media. Easy and unfair.
This is the same news organization, who, in 1998 after Tara Lipinski won the women's figure skating gold medal at the Olympics defeating Michelle Kwan, led with the headline: "American beats out Kwan." (Hint: the problem with this headline is that Michelle was born, raised, lives in the USA and is as American as apple pie and Mu Shu Pork).
I say, let's not be too hard on MSNBC. If they can't figure out that Americans are American, it's probably too much to expect that they know the rudiments of American geography.