Today in journalism history: Supporting the troops

Surely politics stopped at the water's edge in the waning days of 1941, right? And America's Newspapers stood on the side of those whose loved ones were in peril on the sea? And bizarre Midwestern whackjobs, while allowed their every constitutional right, were nonetheless gently shunted off to padded rooms where they could yell as loudly as they wanted to?

Well, sort of. "We, The Mothers, Mobilize for America" has been writing to the parents of sailors killed in the escalating battle of the Atlantic, suggesting that they "call to account the real murderers of your loved one, the men who violated the Constitution of the United States by sending him into the war zone."

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Forbidden ledes

Ledes of the form Dead That's What* are forbidden under all circumstances anyway. Their evil nature is underscored when a pronoun like "me" is left flapping the breeze with nothing but the byline to refer back to.

I suspect that the motive, once again, is the morbid fear of writing a first-cycle lede in an always-on world. That's generally overblown as it is; readers aren't nearly as attentive to news as such an assumption would require. And when the cure is worse than the imaginary disease, we might as well be leeching to cure a case of witch-possession. Stop it.

* From Thurber's "Dead. That's what the man was when they found him."

On bogus stories and spotting them

Today's quiz: What's the difference between these two stories?

If your answer was on the order of "One is about a well-attested empirical phenomenon of the grownup world, and the other is about a fictional crisis fabricated by a tiny cabal of self-interested, America-hating kleptocrats and their media enablers," take the rest of the day off. Otherwise, stick around.

Let's go ahead and bust some bubbles to start with:

• It's the sled
• Rick makes Ilse get on the plane with Victor
• There is no Santa Claus

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On second thought, don't

Q: Well, what about those boring, picky, literal-minded, whiny, poetry-hating, clock-watching copy editors? Aren't they ever thankful for anything?

A: Of course we are! An expanse of sunless Midwest bleak enough to make Death give you pawn and move! Language Czarina and operative "Boris" are taking turns at the piano, the fridge is full of beer, and no one seems to think it necessary to annoy a perfectly good turkey just because it's the fourth Thursday of November. And perhaps best of all -- it's someone else's turn to copyedit the annual Thanksgiving paean! Take it away, Kansas City:

On the first hour of Thanksgiving, my true love gave to me:

A pumpkin-flavored latte.

Is this a great country or what? The last quarter-century has seen an explosion of varieties, flavors, and choices in just about everything! Our girls play sports, our boys an endless stream of video games, our talkie-typie gadgets are multiplying like Asian carp, every kind of music pours through our ear buds, the automobile market resembles a candy store — only granddad remembers how Henry Ford once offered only black licorice.

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Yes

This just in from "The Takeaway," which is what happens when you try to make public radio sound like a drive-time tabloid guy show:

North Korea: Misunderstood, or armed and dangerous?

Or maybe it's depraved on account of it's deprived. I don't know.

 

It's beginning to look a lot like ...

... another of the year-round Forbidden Heds, sneaking in while our attention is on the seasonal atrocities. No more "not your father's," ever, under any circumstances.

The radio seems quite busy now with the conceit that Thanksgiving is "the new Black Friday." Let's set that one out on the midden for the wolves, shall we? And while we're at it, let's ponder what might happen if we didn't have a shopping centerpiece on the Friday front.

Forbidden heds

Not to be distracting your vigilance from the great cliches of Xpesmastide (see John McIntyre's comprehensive list), but do bear in mind that heds of the form "Mr. ____ Goes to Washington" are permanently banned under all circumstances.

No formal ruling yet on heds of the form "Harry Potter and the ____  ____," but extreme caution is advised lest ye be caught with thy hand in the cookie jar when the trump sounds.

Miracles!

My first thought on this one was -- well, that's a novel bit of restraint, isn't it? Someone's instinct was to proclaim State's not-quite-tying catch a miracle, but cooler heads prevailed and it was downgraded to "nearly miraculous."

It's not a perfect solution. Reporting on sports near-miracles still entails some assumptions about miracles, and miracles take a lot of the fun out of watching the stuff in the first place. (You may conclude from Bucky Dent's home run that the world is a cold, random and luckless place, but you may not conclude it is governed by magic.) But then I was reminded of the same paper's treatment of -- wow, could it be a Carolina game from just a few months back?

To recap, then: Carolina rates a "miracle comeback" for dropping a pass in the end zone, then dropping another pass in the end zone. (Either one would have tied the game, but at the standard exchange rate of 6 points for a touchdown, neither would have won it; even if the same pass had been dropped twice, it wouldn't have been the "winning TD.") The farmers get a "nearly miraculous" for actually catching a pass in the end zone (against, ahem, we have to point out, Carolina, whom they went on to beat). Can you start to imagine why some people out there in readerland might suspect a bit of a double standard?

We'll never entirely erase such perceptions, even if we do stop enthusiastically fueling them. There's a reason that college football and the Fractious Near East are the two areas in which the "hostile media effect" was first demonstrated. But we can try to damp things down a little, and banning miracles -- period, without exception, under all circumstances -- would be a start.

You provide the Photoshops ...

OK, there's no evidence to indicate that William Randolph Hearst ever actually said "you furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." But Charlie Kane did (more or less), and it looks as if certain crusading news executives don't want to be left out of the game.

"America's Third War" has been going on for a week over at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network. (I seem to have missed Monday's version; these frontpage grabs are from Thursday and Friday.) Are you doing your part?

Lede of the morning

Today's example of the grab-bag nature of news syntax:

Charlotte-Mecklenburg police late Friday released the names of officers who were fired or involved in more than 400 suspensions in the last five years -- the first time the public has been allowed to inspect a police department's disciplinary records under a new North Carolina law.

Upon careful consideration, it appears to be something like this: Names of cops who were fired or suspended during the past five years have been released. More than 400 suspensions have been handed out over that time. Any reason not to just hang on to that second bit of information there for the second graf?

Inch less foam! Inch more beer!

Where do people get the idea that they ought to write like this? And why do otherwise reasonable adults let them get away with it?

Who was that masked man I saw you with last night?

That was no masked man; that was first-time officeholder and political outsider Gov.-elect Rick Snyder!

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Se habla EspanLol

On the side of a delivery truck, I-75 south, around 10 a.m.:

"Sabe FUD!"

Grammar by thunderbolt

Here's how life looks from the vantage point of the reporting textbook:

The readers of one newspaper once confronted the following one-sentence paragraph:

"Paradoxically, cancer-causing mutations often result from the repair of a cell by error-prone enzymes and not the 'carcinogenic' substance's damage to the cell," Abe Eisenstark, director of biological sciences at the university, said at a meeting of the Ad Hoc Council of Environmental Carcinogenesis Wednesday night at the Cancer Research Center.

If there is a message in those 53 words, it would take a copy editor, a lexicologist and a Nobel Prize-winning scientist to decipher it. The message simply is not clear.

It's fun to be part of your own Dan Brown novel, isn't it? Oops, left the lexicologist behind somewhere along the Friedrichstrasse! Depending on what kind of science the "Nobel Prize-winning scientist" does, I'm not sure we need her either, because I'm not sure whether the problem -- whatever it is that makes this message so "not clear" -- is in the sciency part of the sentence or the J101 part.

The first half seems pretty straightforward: Weird as it may seem, sometimes the problem isn't the cancer-causing substance but the well-meaning efforts of your damn bumbling enzymes to fix the damage. (Honk if those enzymes have worked on your car at some point.) As long as you don't mind a few words like "carcinogenic" (you are reading an article about cancer, after all) and "paradoxically" (since the speaker is introducing a bit of a paradox), it's hard to see why this bit would be singled out.

Now, granted, we have a 53-word sentence here (counting the hypenated compounds as two words each), and it weights in at 27.9 on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale that Microsoft kindly provides. But most of those words come after the science part ends -- in other words, the part where it starts sounding like a news sentence piling in everything it can.* Pretend for a moment that it's two sentences:

"Paradoxically, cancer-causing mutations often result from the repair of a cell by error-prone enzymes and not the 'carcinogenic' substance's damage to the cell," he said.

Abe Eisenstark, director of biological sciences at the university, spoke at a meeting of the Ad Hoc Council of Environmental Carcinogenesis Wednesday night at the Cancer Research Center.

The first gets a 16.8 on the grade level scale, and the second an 18.9; as a paragraph, they land at 17.8. I'm not going to suggest that we follow Flesch and Kincaid off into the sunset, but I think we could reasonably hope to hack our way out of a prepositional thicket like that one without invoking lexicology and Science.

What actually sent me off to the bookshelves for that particular text was this sentence in Monday's fishwrap:

It has been assumed that Ilitch, the owner of the Red Wings and Tigers, would buy the Pistons ever since he entered into an exclusive 30-day negotiating period early last month with Karen Davidson and Palace Sports & Entertainment to buy the franchise that Forbes values at $479 million — although it’s believed the eventual purchase price will be lower.

Like the first, it requires you to bring a little knowledge to the table before you start: how an "exclusive 30-day negotiating period" works, for example. And there are a couple of passive verbs -- one of them following an especially ill-turned restrictive clause -- that demand a lot of trust in the writer. All in, it's only fractionally lower on the Flesch-Kincaid scale (26.4) than the sentence that required a whole legion of superheroes.

Why does one sentence call down the wrath of the academy while the other is (pretty literally) journalistic business as usual? I think, again, that it goes back to some fundamental misunderstandings about how we teach "grammar" and the related arts. "Clarity" isn't a property that mere mortals can achieve by themselves, perhaps by identifying a train wreck of prepositional phrases and diverting some of the subsequent traffic elsewhere. There's nothing you can take away for next time: no indication of what makes "the message" of a sentence unclear, no hints for how the novice might look for ways to cluster all those grammatically correct chunks of information elsewhere in less obtrusive ways.

I think we need to bring "clarity" down from the mountaintop and show people how to make use of it on the ground. The gods are having a lot of fun hurling thunderbolts, but they aren't contributing much to the cause.

* Aw, go ahead and guess what textbook J-students at "the university" use.

Drudge surrenders

I'm not quite sure what to make of Matt Drudge's decision to throw in the towel at this point (except for the likelihood that the Times will feel obliged to run a column about it pretty soon). What's the tipping point here: People in modest clothing dictated by their faith being subjected to patdown searches? The possible association of the religious with substate political violence? As terrorist victories go, this looks pretty small-scale compared with, say, convincing the media system and a large chunk of the civil power structure to let the executive branch get away with the destructive, tangential and almost certainly illegal invasion of Iraq. But perhaps that's just me.

It's been true for some time that if we wanted Israeli-level airline security, we could have it. I don't think we want it.* For some reason, I also don't think Drudge's goal here is to help people make rational interpretations about the relationship between risk and the level of intrusiveness they're willing to accept. Editors are free to accept his instructions at face value. Or they may laugh them out of the building.

* I don't know. Get a seat behind a Baptist tour group from North Carolina on a flight to Ben-Gurion sometime and tell me what you think.

Crash blossoms like an arrow

Diagramming party to transporter room: Who's doing what to whom?

Bad things happen when you make up your own meanings just to fit the hed count. "Rerun" is a perfectly good verb, but it's transitive, so my coffee-deprived parser's first reaction here is to make "rerun" a noun. If you know who Mr. Anuzis is or had the instinctive good fortune to figure out that he's some sort of Republican leader, rather than a planet or an Egyptian deity, you could be forgiven for thinking the hed is a creatively dismissive slap at the GOP's lesser lights. Who's going to lead the party? Just a bunch of Anuzis reruns.

Reality, as usual, is duller:

Former Michigan Republican Party chairman Saul Anuzis is running for a second time to be chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Remember, kids: Rotate your tires, brush after between-meal treats, and don't make up your own verbs.

Rule of thumb

Here's the Rule of Thumb for ledes: If you can put your thumb over the lede with no effect whatsoever on the story that follows, you can (and probably should) just delete the lede.

Owing to its strange incarnation of the no-jump policy, the Freep's capital buro managed to come up with, in essence, two disposable ledes on the same story* in one day. At top is the 1A version:

This time they stirred the drink -- added a twist -- and it came out just right.

And for 5A, a Forbidden Lede steps in:

What a difference a month makes.

Neither of which does any good if you're interested in finding out what went on (and, despite the newspaper industry's widespread fear of the first-day lede, there's actually a good chance that lots of the readership hasn't heard of the previous day's doings in the statehouse). For that, the second graf of the 1A billboard or the second graf of the featurized version inside would do just fine.

There'd still be plenty of bad writing to go around -- the concluding graf on 1A, for example:
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Buried titles in a very small place

I trust everybody's been keeping up* with Language Log's thorough coverage of the cop who is accused in the press of -- as kindly Dr. Pullum puts it -- "having a little passive-aggressive fun by peppering his inquest evidence with song titles."

The weight of evidence looks pretty persuasive, I'd say. The British press have their undershorts in a massive wad about a purported correlation that just ain't there -- at least, not to any appreciable degree different from the way everyone else's speech seems to employ song titles (or the sorts of phrases that are attractive to songwriters in the first place). But a comment from the 8:58 traffic report this morning provided a nice reminder that yes, sometimes people do dig deeply into the bin of strange allusions.

First things first. No, we do not actually have more words for "traffic" than other languages do. But we do have a lot of radio stations, a lot of freeway and a lot of cars, so the discourse of traffic does produce some pretty distinctive talk. Pockets of Go would be a really outstanding band name. It seems to be unknown to Google outside of constructions like "pockets of go-betweens," "pockets of go-go bars" and "the deep pockets of Go-Daddy,"** but it's how some trafficaster described one of the freeways a couple of weeks ago: "pockets of go."

Today's example was different. The announcer's introduction to the traffic bulletin was on the order of "And it looks like I-94 is a street without joy, right?" I don't think that was pulled out of nowhere, and it causes me to think we have a closet Bernard Fall fan over at WWJ. Fall was the French academic who -- more or less by accident, in his account -- became an authority on the French and, later, the American entanglement with Vietnam; the "Street Without Joy" provided him with a book title and, years later, was where he died (here's the Time account***).

Fall was a keen observer and an engaging writer, well worth a return visit even at this remove.**** Here's a nice bit of realism-with-a-human-face to season the standard author's disclaimer, from a later edition of "Street Without Joy":

A letter which accompanied a Certificate of Appreciation which I received from the Department of Defense in 1961 referred in part to my "tireless effort to secure the facts and data as they are, and not as one wishes them to be." This has been my guiding principle in all my research work, no matter how painful the process is at times to national pride or to widely held prejudices. I am therefore happy to claim sole responsibility for all views and opinions expressed in this book.

What do you get when you search Google for "street without joy"? Little else but references to the book. There appears to be a band with a page on Facebook, and imdb has a listing for a 1938 French melodrama by that name. Perhaps that's the route by which it snuck into the jargon of the French troops. How it showed up on a Detroit radio station in late 2010 -- help us out there, Language Log.

* Some of our usual suspects are indeed making distinctive contributions to it.
** Or where "pockets of air" breaks at line 60. Go figure.
*** "Stout, cheerful Bernard Fall" is classic Timespeak.
**** Dammit. I thought Fall was the one who described Gen. Navarre as "physically and morally feline"; that was a different author, Jules Roy. But it's far too cool not to mention.

Anniversaries

And with a hint like that, anniversary fans -- name this house of worship!

(Free tip: That's a good guess, but double-check the name before you hit "send." Heh heh.)

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More random syntax of news

Another distinctive feature of news language is the top-to-bottom way in which it adds details to the "inverted pyramid" it's building. Because it's distinctive, it's especially striking when you get it wrong, and the local fishwrap has particular trouble distinguishing time as a detail from time as a transitional element. Hang on for a few examples.

The details are supposed to be worked in top to bottom, and usually from general to specific. If the lede says two people were shot during a bar fight Saturday on the west side of town, subsequent grafs will tell you which bar, who the victims are, how late in the festivities it happened, and how the victims are doing -- all interspersed with quotes from cops, witnesses or nearby merchants and seasoned with archival information on crime in the neighborhood and over the year.

The trouble comes when those details get mixed up with storytelling techniques: "Shortly before 11 p.m." isn't the same thing as "And before you could say Jack Robinson." As in this one from Saturday's paper:

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Spelling coup of the year

Please tell me you meant this one, AP.

The AP is catching up with a five-day-old story about the pieing of the archbishop of Belgium, Andre Leonard, who has apparently "shocked Catholics by sympathizing with priests accused of pedophilia and by saying that homosexuals deserved to get AIDS." And how is his support at home?

On Tuesday, Leonard's spokesman quit his job, saying he could no longer speak for a "loose canon."

Somewhere, Isaac Asimov is pounding on the table.

The strange syntax of news

We've talked about this before, right? The unholy collision of attribution -- which we like, because it helps keep us from being sued,  amen -- with time prepositions, in such a way that the attribution gets in the way of the action? Like these?

A would-be carjacker is dead after police said he was shot and killed by the person whose car he was trying to take on Detroit's west side.

A Canton man is facing charges after police said he fired two rounds from a high-powered rifle into a fireplace in his home in the 2300 block of Amber Street on Monday, prompting his two roommates to flee.

Two Detroit youths — one a student at Ferndale’s alternative high school for troubled youths — face preliminary exams Thursday after police said school officials followed them from campus to see them break into a home and steal two large televisions.

Daniel Ray Aderhold was arraigned this afternoon in 19th District Court on the charge after police said he allegedly* fatally attacked Perry Lee Beaubien by beating him in the head after the two had an argument.

None of these things happened "after" the cops said something, strictly put. They happened after someone did something criminal, and "police said" is there because ... attribution! We're not reporting something we witnessed; we're reporting what we were told. Conveniently, if we note that "police said" it, we're also wrapping ourselves in the blanket of privilege, which allows us to repeat a defamatory statement with impunity, owing to the circumstances in which it was made. "Smith hit Jones upside the head with a 2x4, police said" is protected in a way that "Smith hit Jones, a perpetually irritated neighbor tells EyeWitlessNews."

So "after" and "police said" don't have the same sort of syntactic relationship that preposition and clause do in "after the ball was over" or "after you've gone." "After police said" is a craft routine. It's short for "something happened after something else in more or less the order we're telling you, but for safety's sake, we're going to stick the attribution** in the middle." It's pretty harmless when you get used to it, but every now and then you get one that's actually ambiguous:

A Melvindale teen said she consumed Four Loko*** before she said she was sexu­ally assaulted last month.

"She said" is there for a good reason. We weren't there, and we don't know what happened, so we're going to signal our uncertainty. But grammar has us in a bit of a trap here. "Before" could reasonably go with "said," suggesting that the accuser was drunk when she made the assertion, or with the sexual assault.

This would have been a nice chance for an editor to step in and untangle the robotic writing. We're asking a lot when we expect readers to infer all the coded signals we send.

* Sigh. As a rule, the cops don't say someone "allegedly" did it; they say he did it, leaving it to the reporters to throw in "allegedly" in the vain hope that it might guard them from a lawsuit or make them look old and wise.
** Why don't writers simply set the attribution off with commas? ("Smith was arrested after, police said, she emptied a magazine into her former employer's trailer"). Too much work, and it isn't the way we've always done it, so there.
*** It'd be more complete to note that the accuser testified that she had been mixing it first with rum and later with cognac, but that doesn't go as well with the narrative of this story.

At the fear factory

Oh, come on. Didja really think it was going to stop after the election?

Melissa Taggart says she was delighted that her son was learning a foreign language in the eighth grade -- until she learned he was expected to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish.

And that he'd receive a zero if he didn't. (Music, maestro)

Taggart, of Edmond, Okla., said the Pledge should be recited in English -- and English only. (You can see why Oklahoma was in such a hurry to ban that evil sharia law this year! That relationship between liturgical language and the ritual itself is already sneaking in.)

“English is our language … and I just feel it’s wrong that he would have to say the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States of America in Spanish. It’s just wrong,” a frustrated Taggart told KFOR.

She said she couldn't begin to understand why her son's teacher would choose the Pledge for her class. And she was upset that her son was told he would receive a zero if he did not complete the assignment. (Any of you teachers out there want to take a swing at finishing this one from here?)

.... But Brenda Lyons, associate superintendent and public information officer for the Edmond School District, defended the class assignment, saying the school's language curriculum calls for students to translate and recite something that they are familiar with.

“The Pledge assignment has been in place for years.” Lyons told FoxNews.com. “It is written in the curriculum for Spanish that students need to learn something they are familiar with, like short phrases in the foreign language."

Right -- long story short, somebody forgot to do the assignment, and he thought he'd found a way out of it, and one thing led to another, and next thing you know, "the Quran ate my homework" became the third most important story for most of the day at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network.*

Why? Well, it's interesting to note how the "US" section of the Fox Web site breaks down: Crime, Economy, Immigration, Disasters, National Interest, Terror, Military, Religion, Education and Road to Recovery. (Don't look for the jobs report under "Road to Recovery"; it goes under "Politics.") "National Interest" is the category for stories like this one -- and kids sent home from school for wearing flag shirts, veterans told to stop flying the flag, school groups ordered to stop singing the national anthem at the Lincoln Memorial, and the like. It's where you go if you haven't had enough chances to complain about the ACLU in your day-to-day life and need to find your fellow outraged partisans -- or if you just need to vent about the Mexicans and the Muslims and the teachers and the unions and the liberals and the media. At Fox, that is the national interest.

* That was Thursday. Today, that evil Keith Olbermann is in its place.

Isn't this the ... bad part of town?

In case you were getting all your election news from the Lame- stream Media and missed it, Uncle Buckle the Safety Buffalo had a treat for you over at Fox:

An apparent member of the New Black Panther Party was spotted Tuesday standing outside the same Philadelphia polling station where voter intimidation was reported two years ago.

Hey, kids? Free journalism tip: If you need a qualifier in the lede, you need it in the hed too!

Monitors from the city government watchdog Committee of Seventy and other agencies have been keeping a close eye on the individual dressed in New Black Panther-style clothing, committee president Zack Stalberg told FoxNews.com.

"Other agencies"?

He said the man, whom MyFoxPhilly tried to interview, has been there for several hours and is "not friendly," but that he doesn't appear to be causing a disturbance."He wasn't friendly looking, but he was behaving himself," he said.

(Can our Philadelphia readers help out here? Is that how y'all say "didn't get uppity" over there?)

MyFoxPhilly.com reported that the man, wearing a pin showing his party affiliation, a black hat, glasses and leather coat, was seen outside the polling place in north Philadelphia -- the same polling place where in 2008 two members of the New Black Panther Party stood shaking a billy club and allegedly intimidating voters.

The unidentified man on Tuesday would not answer questions posed by MyFoxPhilly, but was apparently working at the polls as a volunteer and greeting voters. There have, as of yet, been no reports of voter intimidation at the polling station.

"As yet."

I think I've found the real source of my annoyance with campaign coverage this year. The grownup wing of journalism -- the notionally professional side -- has bought completely into a bizarre narrative in which there's nothing on the landscape but righteous anger at out-of-control spending and the expansion of gubmint. No one's bothering to explain why this movement that, as CNN puts it, "emerged in 2009 in opposition to expanded government and the growing federal deficit" is so obsessed with two guys shaking the old billy club at a polling place in Philadelphia in 2008. Or why its candidates are the ones who are eager to free Dearborn from the jackboot of sharia terrorist mayor Jack O'Reilly, or who really don't think the First Amendment even kinda-sorta hints at this church-state stuff the liberals are always on about. Or why these folks are allowed such authority over the grownup news agenda when they have their own 24-hour PR service ready to do their bidding.

Busy few weeks around here, so lots of stuff got stuck into the "maybe" file that would have been fun to talk about. Good to know that our friends at Fox are going to keep providing material.

Today in journalism history: Supporting the troops

Ever run across one of those strange complaints about Those Liberal Media? Why don't they support the troops the way they used to? Back when they were on America's side, they'd never run a headline like "We Ask For It"!

This one's from the World's Greatest Newspaper, November 1, 1941; the "James" is the destroyer Reuben James, sunk the day before by a German submarine. That was a result of all that Democratic meddling in European wars, which we still had a chance to stay out of, so if it made the New Deal smear crowd look bad, onto the front page it went!

Amazing that it took another 30-some years before "The Agenda-Setting Effect of Mass Media" was published, innit?