How news puts a thumb on the scales

I'm not complaining about the headline, which I think is one of those cases in which "objective" journalism works perfectly well. A straight-faced rendition in big type of a bullshit claim* allows the bullshit to shine through without putting the news outlet on one side or the other. My concern is with the lede,** in which a commonplace bit of news practice -- trying to get back on-cycle by emphasizing what was "confirmed," rather than what happened -- actually does put the agency on the side of the bad guys and con artists:

Jamal Khashoggi died during a fight inside Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul, Saudi authorities confirmed late Friday. The announcement, made on state TV and also released via the official Saudi Press Agency, comes more than two weeks after the missing journalist disappeared after entering the diplomatic compound in Turkey.

Like it or not, one basic definition of "news" is something that happened since the last edition (or broadcast, or "time you updated the homepage" for you kids). That's what enabled urchins to hawk tabloids through the teeming streets a century ago, and it's why "confirming" a story on which you were beaten is a standard tactic: you can reclaim the element of what-happened-today without having to credit the outfit that hosed you.

Here, though, USA Today grabbed the wrong verb -- or, at least, ignored the scope of the verb it did grab. It's news that the Saudis have acknowledged Khashoggi's death, but that's not the same as acknowledging -- or "confirming" -- the purported circumstances of his death. As a consequence, USAT (and any other paper for which the assorted Gannett hubs nodded and yawned and waved this through) looks like a tool of the administration and its friends du jour.

Note, on the other hand, the indications of apparent skepticism in this graf: 


The apparent development comes as President Donald Trump has seemed to shift his thinking on the case. Asked late Thursday if he thought the Saudi dissident was dead, the president said it "certainly looks that way to me" and vowed "very severe" consequences for Saudi Arabia if it is proved to be behind Khashoggi's murder.

Well, a couple of things. One, if the Saudis have admitted that the guy is dead, that's a development, not an "apparent development" -- take a chance here, USA Today! And surely we can do better than claiming that the president "has seemed to shift his thinking"; to the extent that he thinks, his thinking shifts every few minutes or so. If for a few moments he's back where he was Tuesday afternoon, or Wednesday morning, that's fine, but the job of a professional news outlet is to compare what he said then to what he said now and give the public some idea of how, if at all, those sequences might correlate.

It's dismaying, in that regard, to look on the page -- more or less all you'll learn about the world outside of southeastern Michigan, if the Freep is your source -- on which this story is presented:

If USAT wants to cover the "caravan" story by rewriting Twitter and various other outlets, fine -- but perhaps individual outlets should be allowed to look for coverage that was written at the scene. (I'm thinking about a fairly competent NPR report I heard on the way home Friday, in which things had gotten dicey enough at the border that the correspondent couldn't get back from Guatemala into Mexico.) If seemingly minor details of coverage -- the unthinking adoption of Fox News's (and the administration's) rhetoric on the movement of "caravans" toward the border, and the Saudi "confirmation" of the party line on Khashoggi's death -- go unchallenged, though, we have a different problem. I'd prefer the olden days, in which papers the Freep's size made their own decisions about which parts of the world they'd cover and how they'd do it. Or, at least, didn't run manifest nonsense in the bargain.

* I'd be more than half-tempted to put scare quotes around "fight," and I think there's a case for it. but I'm getting old.
** Sorry about the link to WingNutDaily, but this version doesn't seem to be online at either the Freep, where I read it, or at USA Today (note the differences if you follow the link from WND). I don't know what that means. One guess would be that USAT changed its idiot lede but nobody else in the Gannett system bothered to notice or had the time or energy to call bullshit on the original.