Out-of-tune hed of the month

When your mayor is charged with perjury, it's hard to argue with "MAYOR CHARGED" as a boxcar-sized 1A hed. The problem here is the deck, She says it's perjury; he vows a fight. "He" has an antecedent; "she" doesn't, and that pushes the hed into the wrong county altogether.

"He said/she said" is a pretty specific set of stuff: as the OED puts it, "characterized by conflicting statements from opposing parties in the absence of concrete evidence." Some examples:
The hearing on the docket presaged another round in the he-said-she-said acrimony of his marriage's breakdown.

Sexual assaults are tricky cases to investigate. In many instances, allegations boil down to he said, she said.

If you read a sexual undertone into "he said/she said," you're probably on track. And this is a case about sex (among many other things). The mayor and his former chief of staff are accused of lying during a whistleblower trial last year when they denied having an affair. Given all that, it's hard to tell from the deck that "he" is a crime suspect and "she" is a prosecutor (who happens to be a woman), isn't it? Almost as hard as imagining a "he said/he said" atop a murder indictment.

The Freep has put a lot of resources and prestige into this ongoing tragicomedy and has produced some fine old-fashioned journalism in the bargain -- there are 11 open pages* of Mayoral Follies of '08 inside the A section, and that isn't chopped liver by any standard. That amount of effort warrants better attention to what you're putting in the show window.

* A down side of this is that you can't tell from the A section that there's a war on -- much less two wars on. That's a very regrettable state of affairs that's becoming all too common downtown.