Friday, January 11, 2019

Reverse double suplex

The Fair 'n' Balanced Network really had the snowflakes on the run Friday morning, didn't it? Or ... what did that frontpage spot look like 12 hours later?
 Let's try to get a few more wrestling metaphors into the hed there, shall we?

 That's better.

Anyway, the story:

Wrestler turned international movie star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson body-slammed a British tabloid on Friday for posting what he called a “fabricated” interview featuring him bashing “snowflakes.”

Johnson took to Instagram Friday evening to “set the record straight” over a story published earlier in the day by The Daily Star. In the interview, he was quoted as lamenting the rise of snowflake culture and criticizing millennials’ need to search for reasons to be offended.


“Earlier today, online, an interview dropped with me, apparently it was with me, where I was insulting and criticizing millennials,” Johnson said in a video posted to his social media page. “The interview never took place. Never happened. Never said any of those words. Completely untrue. 100 percent fabricated.”

Wait -- he's saying a redtop out-and-out fabricated a story? About a CELEBRITY? Well, why is that our concern?


Media outlets, including Fox News, had picked up the story, in which the actor was said to have derided millennials for doing a disservice to war heroes by constantly complaining.

Fox was a little more enthusiastic than it lets on. It had already spun a companion story off the original fabrication before the rebuttal* caught up:
In fairness ("to be sure" is the technical journalistic term), it's technically possible that the Daily Star has exactly the exclusive it claims and the craven wrestler is running for cover on his agent's orders**:

He "laid the smackdown" on PC softies in an exclusive chat with the Daily Star.

While The People’s Champion applauds the fact nowadays anyone can “be who they want to be” the musclebound man-mountain raged at the constant offence snowflakes take from everything.

The legendary wrestler turned actor says it does a disservice to war heroes who fought for freedom of speech.


I don't keep up a lot with Dwayne Johnson's unscripted speech, so maybe somebody he's wont to lapse into British English collective noun agreement:

... “So many good people fought for freedom and equality - but this generation are looking for a reason to be offended.

So it sounds like we ought to to go with "at minimum, partially fabricated"; the Star is going to laugh all the way to the bank anyway, and Fox will have to go back to stoking its own outrages. But it's fun to note how a verb like "body-slams" can switch sides in such a hurry.***

* Both URLs point to the same story now, alas.
** See the comments at Fox; it takes a while to get down to the point where the text is updated, but it's worth the effort.
*** Maybe it means something different at Fox when you put in the hyphen than when you leave it out.

Labels: , , , ,

2 Comments:

Anonymous raYb said...

I think that a US rep bodyslams (no hyphen), but former wrestlers pause at the top, thus the hyphen for a break in the action. Just trying to be fair and balanced here.

12:27 AM, January 12, 2019  
Blogger fev said...

That has the makings of a stylebook entry, all right.

5:09 PM, January 15, 2019  

Post a Comment

<< Home