All in the family

Saturday afternoon's top story at the Fair 'n' Balanced homepage comes to you courtesy of -- let's be sure we have all the characters straight here -- a Fox reporter watching a Fox talk show host tell a different Fox talk show that Peace Is At Hand:

Lara Trump told “Fox & Friends” on Saturday that there is hope that the situation with Iran wraps up very quickly, we are hoping, maybe in the next couple hours.” 

The host of “My View With Lara Trump” made the remark after President Donald Trump held a meeting in the Situation Room of the White House on Friday regarding the war. 

“I think this president wants to do what's right. Period,” Lara Trump said of her father-in-law. “He has never looked at things, 'well this is politically advantageous, so let me do this.' He looks at things as in is this right for America? Is this right for our future security? And that is 100% what you got with this Iran situation.”

Meanwhile (give or take a few minutes; it was posted at 1:16 p.m. Eastern US), the family's other chief peacemaker was busy suppporting his contention that America -- could it have been a dead country only two years ago? -- is BACK and now the HOTTEST country in the world:

Even by the standards of the WWII-era Chicago Tribune's attempts to explain the world through baseball, this one's just weird. We might have the world's shortest-range infield practice in the foreground, except the kid with the bat has gotten set again in a hurry, and the kid at third base is playing really deep, which may be why he's holding his bat by the knob. Or maybe he's the goalie, except there seems to be a translucent baseball at the end of his shadow, unless that's a portal to the underworld. I don't know. But back to Lara at the policy desk:

“Of course the president didn’t want to have a conflict with Iran just ahead of these midterms. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have had to do this. But the can got kicked down the road, it landed in his lap and much like so many other things with this president, he is the one to get the job done, whether we are talking about Maduro and making sure that you know, he is held accountable, whether we are talking about ensuring Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon,” she said.

“Obviously the hope is that this wraps up very quickly, we are hoping, maybe in the next couple hours we get a solution here, but he is going to do what’s right no matter what,” Lara Trump added.

Her interview with the president is set to air at 9 p.m. ET on Saturday.
You may have to scroll a bit,  because the link takes you to the day's Iran liveblog, but if you hang in there, you'll get to the interview itself. Here's a preview:

During the interview, Lara Trump said “I’d imagine if you could have timed things perfectly, having a conflict just in front of the midterm elections at time like this, isn’t ideal.”

“So you have really a very small window, so if you wanted to play that game then you would wait until the midterms are over and then the following hour, you'll attack Iran because they cannot have a nuclear weapon, most people agree with me on that,” Trump responded.

“But then it gets maybe carried into, you know, the next election whether it’s a midterm or not. So you have a very short window for doing anything having to do with war. But I don’t view that window, I view it I have to do what’s right,” he added.

So glad the family has everything figured out for us.

It ain't about the prompts

This is not the end of professional editing in media texts, and the beginning of the end of professional editing in media texts is damn near old enough to vote, so it isn't that either. But it is a quantifiable data point in the study of how and where value is assigned to professional routines.

Your brow might furrow beneath the green eyeshade at several points in the text above (drawn from the day's liveblog, the salience of which is another indicator). "Signalling" or "signaling"? They're equally correct, so if you did what the style manual says, fine (hope you looked first). Hyphenating "-ly" adverbs? If that's the rule, a tip of the hat to you.

But -- because editors should always have at least one brain cell in the gutter -- those may not have been the first to catch your attention. "Diarrhoea" is a correct spelling, but not on my, and CNN's, side of the ocean. A link at the top of the story indicates that the writer is based in London, suggesting that CNN hasn't learned from the utterly dagenham story that called Carolina-Duke a "local derby" when a UK writer was loosed upon the game.

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