The missing middle

If you're fond of Fox (and you know you are), you've seen this fake news trick before. It's how "a longtime activist against Islam" arrested for violating a court order gets into the headlines as "arrested for filming outside child grooming outside trial": all you do is leave out the middle term in the news syllogism.

In the case at hand, as it turns out, there are half a dozen middle terms, assisted by a head fake from the particular journalistic use of "after" to mean "as a consequence of" or "in the course of" ("2 killed after truck hits car"). This is more or less the sequence, as Fox tells it:

• Suspect tries to fill water cup with soda
• Employee tells him he'll have to pay for that; suspect declines and leaves the restaurant
• Employee follows to remind suspect he isn't welcome back
• Suspect responds by trying to kick employee and heads for another restaurant
• Cops pursue him into bathroom of second restaurant, where he begins "to resist and fight with the officers"
• Enter the Taser

So, technically, yes. He was "Tasered after filling water cup with soda," but you probably don't need to look over your shoulder the next time you go for seconds -- any more than the jackbooted advance guards of sharia law will swoop down on you if you go to Britain and decide to film a random street scene with your phone. The latter is a more distinctively Foxian ideology, but the former is ideological as well, as long as you count tabloidism as an ideology.

And yes, "Coke Fiend" is in strikingly poor taste, but at least it holds out the possibility that someone at Fox thinks "Coke" is a generic term for soft drinks.