Headline: 'White House Says Bears Part of Blame for Senate Loss'

A story filed Wednesday afternoon by Reuters seemed to suggest the White House had blamed the Chicago Bears football team for losing Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts.

The headline, which ran above a Reuters story on the New York Times' website, was titled, "White House Says Bears Part Of Blame For Senate Loss."

It turned out the story meant to say that the White House said it bore some of the responsibility for losing the Massachusetts Senate seat. It didn't mean to say that Obama's hometown team was to blame for a congressional race roughly a thousand miles away.

But if the White House did mean to blame the Bears, they're not alone.

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert satirically fingered bears as a serious threat to America's security in 2006 -- singling out the team as staging a potential alliance with tigers to undermine the United States.

"These bears continue to be a threat to America's safety and security," Colbert quipped. "They have now shown that they possess superhuman recuperative powers and they cannot be stopped. Word has it that the bears have signed a pact with the tigers to take over the American sports landscape and beyond. These bloodthirsty animals are becoming an eminent threat to America and we may need to use preemptive action to squash this threat. We must force these bears back into hibernation like in the 1990s or face the repercussions of a full out bear assault. Let's just hope it's not 1985 all over again."

The Reuters story follows.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Wednesday said the administration of President Barack Obama shared part of the blame for his Democratic Party's loss of a crucial Senate race in Massachusetts that cost it a super-majority.

"Everybody bears some responsibility, certainly the White House," Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs told a media briefing.

Republican Scott Brown on Tuesday won election to the U.S. senate that has cost Democrats their 60-seat majority needed to overcome delaying tactics by the Republican opposition to Obama's legislative reform agenda.