Literalman:
To me it implies criticism and ridicule,
Hergé was setting out to make fun of them, and said so in an interview; when he talked to Numa Sadoul, Sadoul asked him about the incident. From p.183 of
Tintin et Moi, Entretiens avec Hergé (2000 edition):
Sadould: Ses rédacteurs ne vous en ont pas voulu?
Hergé: Je ne crois pas. Je crois même savoir qu'ils en ont bien ri. Ils ont le sens de l'humour, à Paris... euh, Flash!
Je pensais évidemment à un célèbre hebdomadaire coutumier de l'erreur, au point de croire qu'il y avait, au sein de la rédaction, un membre spécialement payé pour introduire des fautes!
Which roughly translates as:
Sadoul: Its editors didn't hold it against you?
Hergé: I don't think so. I even believe that they had a good laugh about it. They have a sense of humor in Paris... err, Flash!
Obviously, I was thinking of a famous weekly that was accustomed to errors, to the point of believing that there was, within their editorial staff, a member especially paid to introduce mistakes!
He related an incident where he'd been interviewed by journalists about
Tintin, and they had (for some reason) got him to provide the accurate dimensions of the Tintin & Snowy sign on top of the Le Lombard building in Brussels, which he got for them for their notes - and when the article came out, they had garbled the stats so that, "
everything was changed, inverted: 25m had become 2m50, 3m50 had become 35m...! So I played at putting a bunch of disconnections in the same style in my story, and I had a lot of fun doing it!" (p.185).