From your lips to dog's ear

If your first reaction to Wednesday evening's top story at the Fair 'n' Balanced homepage was on the order of "OMG the wine mom agitators are eating the dogs and eating the cats of the people who live there," there's probably a reason for that. And no doubt "going after the dogs" would be the sort of thing for which we have rules of engagement. But let's look a bit more closely at the trail from a 3:45 p.m. Homeland Security* tweet to Our Top Story posted at 7:34 and see how quickly the panic button should be punched.

For starters, the Fox lede introduces a nice bit of syntactic ambiguity:

Federal officials on Wednesday said a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) K-9 was targeted in Minneapolis after an employee at a kennel wrote "ICE OUT" on the dog’s feed chart.

Fox tends to be promiscuous with subordinators (you can add "as tensions reach fever pitch" to almost any headline, even if your heroes had just tamped down the tensions in the previous day's story), but this one goes -- maaaybe -- a step beyond the tweet. Was Dina (no reason to think she is not a Very Good Dog) targeted after someone wrote on her food chart, or does "after" refer to when the federal officials sent their tweet?

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said anti-ICE agitators in Minneapolis are targeting CBP K-9s, including a K-9 named "Dina."

"At the kennel where K-9 Dina was staying, it was discovered that an employee had written "ICE OUT" on her feed chart," DHS wrote in a social media post. "THEY’RE EVEN GOING AFTER THE DOGS!"

And that's about the extent of the news, except for this:

It is unclear which kennel Dina was staying at or the current employment status of the employee allegedly responsible.

"It is unclear" here is shorthand for "we have no idea and don't see why we should bother to check," but enough about the Rules of Journalism. The rest is boilerplate: just enough to support another advance in the Everybody Is Mean To ICE saga.

Attackwise, though, there seems to be a bit of a problem. Unlike the brave officers who can hardly sit down for a meal without having to get up and arrest the staff, how does Dina know she's being gone after? Even if she can read (being a Very Good Dog, after all), would she know enough Restaurant English to tell whether "NO ICE" is a drink order or a political statement? Or could it be that the wine mom agitators are actually going after Dina's humans?

It's a decades-old truism of media sociology that a Hearst or a Murdoch doesn't need to hover over the shoulders of the staff to ensure that every headline has just the right number of adjectives -- or which tweet makes it to the top of the page. If you don't know that when you're hired, you'll pick it up as soon as you see someone praised for getting it right or yelled at for getting it wrong. Homeland Security doesn't have to tell Fox what to do; it just has to throw a batting-practice fastball.

* If only there was a German acronym for "secret state police."