Late yesterday afternoon at the St. Regis Hotel, Carl Icahn debuted a wallop of a proposal to split Time Warner into four distinct companies. Something about increasing the value of each unit .. the sum of the parts was greater than the whole .. yeah, something like that.

But somewhere between the collating and the page counting, reporters got it wrong. Just how big was this proposal? If you ask the New York Times or Business Week, it's 342 pages. If you ask Media Week or Reuters, it's 343 pages. (And if you ask Forbes or The Motley Fool, they just ignore your question — and the page count.)

Which begs the question: Do cover pages count?