Syntactic Hypercorrection

On the front page of the print version of today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is a nice example of a common syntactic hypercorrection in English, the substitution of "whom" for "who". This particular example is interesting. Since "whom" occurs here in a non-case-marked position (if you don't assume ellipsis) and Objective is the default case in such positions in English (e.g., "Will it be Danny? – No, not him/*he."), that might have reinforced the headline writer's (likely unconscious) decision to use the Objective "whom."