n. An admission of a mistake or misjudgment by a member of the media.
2000
A heart-felt media culpa is in order to alert readers Tina McGinnis of Livermore and Wayne Rowe of Benicia. They pointed out that the would-be owl assassin in Dublin, Alan Rondi, used a slingshot, not a rifle, as I reported.
1988 (earliest)
And now once more, in the interests of a clean slate, a fresh start and a genuinely new year, it is time for my annual Media Culpas. This has become a rite of passage for me, a cleansing confession of the errors of my way through the past year."
The originator of this phrase was probably Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, who has been running an annual Media Culpa column since 1988 (in prior years, she used the phrase mea culpa, instead). Media culpa is a play on the Latin phrase mea culpa, "a formal apology or acknowledgment of wrongdoing or guilt"; literally "(through) my fault."