Well, that is upstate...

msnbc upstate ny wrong map

You know, everyone makes mistakes sometimes. It happens.

And sometimes, when it does happen, you have to laugh.

That screengrab above is from the Martin Bashir show on MSNBC, about the upcoming Barack Obama bus tour through upstate New York. And as @AlbanyArchives remarked: "We'd like to welcome Binghamton, Buffalo and Cuse to the Capital Region!"

The show owned up to the mistake. From a tweet last night:

Thank you viewers (and Buffalo bloodline @lukerussert) for pointing out our erroneous PA/NY map...an honest geographic mistake...

[via @AlbanyArchives]

Update: A map of the MSNBC cities versus where the actual cities are (with distances)...

MSNBC cities are approximated. Distances computed using NOAA calculator.

Comments

My first thought is that this map was created by someone from Long Island: everything north of Westchester Co is just "upstate", right?

That is worse than when the Gangland episode on FSU said that Cornell University was "near" Troy, but I guess near is a relative term.

It's not just us; Scranton is pictured about 200 miles west of where it actually is in Lackawanna County.

The late Warren Anderson, resident of Binghamton and former Majority Leader of the NYS Senate, finally gets his revenge.

I wish Binghamton was that much closer to us! I enjoy visiting that area, and we would finally have a Wegmans!

To Colleen: When the Clintons bought their house in Weschester it was reported that it was in "upstate" NY.

@colleen: Back when I was working on the radio ranch there was a call from a national network to cover something in Attica, New York because... upstate.

Attica is like 250 miles away from here.

Well, Rome wasn't built in a day, but apparently, these cities were moved in one!

I'm somewhat surprised that MSNBC didn't just show everything north of NYC as a big black land mass with an arrow pointing to it saying "Upstate NY" with the commentator saying "Obama is going to be somewhere in this area".

As I'm sure people around here notice, any place that isn't NYC or Long Island is generally referred to as "Upstate" by the national media or by people not from here. That gets pretty annoying when you have no idea if a story on the national news is reffering to Rockland County, Syracuse, Buffalo or any other place in between when they say something happened in "Upstate NY".

I think this is probably because people from outside the area (especially from NYC/Long Island) assume that upstate is some massive blob with no roads, cities or landmarks of any kind and probably a total population of about 300 backwoods farmers.

I'm amazed, that in a time when access to reliable maps are at everyone's fingertips, a mistake like this could be made.

Clearly embarrassing that they don't have a process for vetting before graphics they hit the air.

But to me, it looks like someone messed with the labeling after it was done correctly. You can see the that all of the upstate cities are in the correct relationship to each other, with arrows pointing the right way if they were all to fit. They are just on the wrong place in NYS.

Intern? Sabotage? Liberal media conspiracy? Or just an accidental click and drag as they reached for more coffee?

I like to flip the generalization of non-NYC as "upstate" NY and call anything south of wherever I happen to be "downstate."

The reactions (questioning where, or simply the awe) from people are fun when I tell them I work downstate instead of Greene county.

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