Journalism is really in a sad state when a (deliberate?) misquote like that gets all the attention. It's nice to see that someone is actually fact-checking instead of piling on.
Like Android or not, Schmidt has been pilloried in the past 12 hours for a comment he didn't make. I'd expect that some of the more outspoken bloggers print retractions.
A misquote getting corrected in less than a day and getting noticed by a news site which is frequented by the folks who would have seen the original misquote seems pretty good to me.
IMHO I love the current state of tech press (of which Hacker New's is a big part of for my consumption). I feel its much better than it was 10 years ago.
I know they are just bloggers. But it is funny that they only want to be called 'just bloggers' when they fuck up and journalists when they want to be taken seriously.
"Real" journalists make mistakes all the time. Haven't you noticed that just about every newspaper or magazine ever printed had a "corrections" section where they corrected mistakes in previous editions / issues?
However, "fact checking departments" consist of a bunch of folks with no domain expertise, often interns, who do little more than try to find someone who can "verify" what they want to verify. In other words, they're little more than under-paid quote-checkers.
Or more to the point, people remember inaccurate stories - they don't remember the corrections.