Double dip
Marvel at the inventive brilliance of the AP as it manages to squeeze two of the Great Cliches into a single eight-word lede:
CARACAS, Venezuela — Call it the Bolivarian battle of the bulge.
It's easy to see why this was big news at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network, where Hugo Chavez functions as a sort of one-man Insane Clown Posse of strategic peril to our entire way of life. Why it's a big deal to the AP is, or should be, harder to fathom:
President Hugo Chavez said in a televised speech Friday that "there are lots of fat people" in Venezuela and advised his supporters to exercise and eat healthy to trim their waistlines.
Cancer cured, Mideast at peace, and Latin America so completely without developments of interest that there's a place on the budget for executive-branch dietary advice! Whatever else we're throwing over the side, it's nice to see that the American journalistic tradition of rendering the rest of the world as a cartoon is alive and well.
CARACAS, Venezuela — Call it the Bolivarian battle of the bulge.
It's easy to see why this was big news at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network, where Hugo Chavez functions as a sort of one-man Insane Clown Posse of strategic peril to our entire way of life. Why it's a big deal to the AP is, or should be, harder to fathom:
President Hugo Chavez said in a televised speech Friday that "there are lots of fat people" in Venezuela and advised his supporters to exercise and eat healthy to trim their waistlines.
Cancer cured, Mideast at peace, and Latin America so completely without developments of interest that there's a place on the budget for executive-branch dietary advice! Whatever else we're throwing over the side, it's nice to see that the American journalistic tradition of rendering the rest of the world as a cartoon is alive and well.
Labels: AP, forbidden ledes, framing
posted by fev at 10:39 AM
2 Comments:
It certainly helps us to keep them off our minds, or from worrying about them.
One that should also be locked up in The Place Where Bad Ledes Are Sent To Die: On a story earlier this week on the Vatican bringing in outside experts to examine the possibility of extraterrestrial life, The AP just couldn't resist getting clever on us:
"E.T. phone Rome."
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