Last Thursday, we carried a Portland Press Herald article on page B8 of the Morning Sentinel about a U.S. Sen. Susan Collins campaign video that showed Iraq War protesters burning flags, and also showed a separate image of U.S. Rep. Tom Allen — Collins' opponent.

Our copy editor working on the page made a bad error. His headline said, "Collins camp launches video attacking Allen" and went on to say, "Video shows Allen burning flag." The second part of the headline is false.

It was a careless error made under deadline pressure. We do have someone "proof" each page before it is released, but he missed it too.

Allen was justifiably upset — gracious, but upset. He's never done something like burn a flag and Collins' campaign video didn't show him doing it, either.

I personally apologized to Allen and his chief of staff. We corrected it on A2 the following day.

There's no excuse for an error like this but I will note that newspapers are the one manufacturing segment that creates a different product every day. Think about that: Every newspaper is not only different from the day before, it's very different.

Every newspaper offers literally thousands of opportunities for mistakes. When I speak publicly, I sometimes joke that meteorologists would kill for our accuracy rate, which probably exceeds 99 percent.

Still, the Allen headline was a bad error and we have to do better. We've addressed it internally, in the newspaper and apologized to the candidate.