The AV Club might be flippant, cynical and obsessed with the minutiae of popular culture — and certainly, I wouldn’t know anyone else like that — but they’re also unfailingly honest. And when they get hung up on the wrong end of an egregious journalistic fraud, they own up to it as quickly and gracefully as possible.

Take a moment this morning to read editor Keith Phipps’ apology to AV Club readers — and then scroll down past the first wave of comments to read the complex, thoughtful and thoroughly entertaining conversation that follows.

I would make some flippant comment about how this is a more satisfying (and far more personal) apology than the elaborate public shrugs The New York Times offered up over the fabrications of Jayson Blair and the useful idiocy of Judith Miller, but those things happened a few years back and the relationship between journalists and readers are rather different now. And the AV Club guys are journalists, don’t you doubt that for a second.

Well, most of them.