'What many are referring to'

It's certainly been fun the past few days, watching the Fair 'n' Balanced Network tie itself into knots trying to keep up with the official line on the newest "Russia hoax." And Monday morning's No. 2 story is a fine illustration of how the routines of news work to make the Fox perspective look perfectly normal.

There's a tweet from a top newsmaker to cycle the story ahead, so the central assertion never has to rise to the top (as on Sunday, with "Top conservatives demand answers" and "Trump pushes back"). We have denials from the Russians and the Taliban before we get to domestic statements: first an expert, then the rival candidate (though he gets a separate column reflecting the Trump campaign's main election narrative), then the official White House comment, to put all the back-and-forth into context.

The most charming sign of Fox's attention to detail, though, is the hedge in the paragraph addressing the scope of the situation:

The Times’ report sent a shockwave through the Capitol on Friday where politicians have been focused on the recent unrest after George Floyd’s death in police custody and what many are referring to a resurgent coronavirus outbreak.

(Here's a screen capture in case it goes away:)

And just like that, the magic of attribution -- which we all love, right? -- turns a piece of data into just another assertion.



 

The death of irony

You can tell why this is the No. 3 story at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network this evening. It's got everything: anti-Trump bias, happy ending and Muslims Behaving Badly!

New York City college student Yasmin al-Scaryname who claimed to be the victim of a hate crime by Trump supporters is under arrest and charged with filing a false report, a police source told The New York Daily News.

The 18-year-old al-Scaryname caused quite the media stir with her sensationalized account of Trump supporters attacking her on the subway. She claimed three men attempted to pull off her hijab while calling her a terrorist and yelling Trump’s name. All this happened, she said, while New Yorkers sat idly by and watched her get assaulted.

Fun fact of journalism: You can tell more about news practice from how the rules are broken* than from how the rules are followed. "Don't convict 'em in the hed" is a powerful and universally followed rule, because breaking it can have practical consequences as well as ethical ones. If you declare the suspect Guilty Guilty Guilty on Monday and charges are Dropped Dropped Dropped on Thursday, you have some explaining to do if the erstwhile suspect demands to know why your professional negligence allowed a false and defamatory statement onto the front page. Breaking the rule is a calculated risk.

The ethics part, as usual, is more entertaining. Declaring yourself Fair 'n' Balanced means your starting position is not to take sides: Innocent until proven guilty, let's hear both sides, and no matter how loud the crowd gets, the headline is Smallville Loses Heartbreaker, not Blind Ump Costs Our Town Title. You only get to break that rule when there's a higher good to be served.

Stop the tape for a moment to give credit to Heat Street, one of the many parajournalistic sites that provide the sort of content Fox doesn't have the time or attention span to write on its own. Although the entertaining syntax may belong to someone else, the moral conclusion in the hed is Fox's:

The many media outlet’s initial reporting of the fake hate crime did not include qualifiers like “alleged” and “claimed.” Instead they reported the hoax crime as a fact like with Buzzfeed’s story, “Drunk Men Yelling “Donald Trump” Attempt To Remove Woman’s Hijab On NYC Subway.”

OMG Buzzfeed left the attribution out of a headline! Does the Pulitzer committee know about this?

* That's "broken," as opposed to "didn't get the memo about 'Christmas came early' and the last copy editor was furloughed after Thanksgiving." If you want to chart the structure of power in the newsroom, look for stories in which the subjects are known by first name, rather than family name, on second reference; that writer usually outranks most of the editors.

Two editors walk into a bar

So if two copy editors walk into a restaurant and see some dude waving a gun and proclaiming that he's there to investigate a made-up story about the Clinton campaign, they should:

a) Duck
b) Report that the dude is investigating the fake news
c) Try the calamari! Thanks, I'll be here all week.

In the good old days, we could have had (d), avoid the assumption that self-proclaimed investigators hewing to a paranoid style of political discourse are actually doing the things they claim to be doing, particularly when it's going at the top of the front page. The naked guy waving a chainsaw to keep the invisible ammonia beings of Planet Mxyzptlk at bay doesn't get a hed proclaiming MAN FENDING OFF SPACE CREATURES HAS N.C. LINKS.

One would like to think this doesn't need explaining, but perhaps we need to start at the beginning with some stuff. And don't forget your server, folks.

Today in attribution

How are those arithmetic lessons going, Los Angeles Times?

Who's won the most votes?
Clinton also leads Sanders in that category. She has received more than 12.5 million votes, compared with 9.4 million for Sanders. That's a lead of more than 3 million votes, according to calculations by the website Real Clear Politics.

If you believe the numbers, do the subtraction yourself. (And if you're relying on "calculation" by Real Clear Politics, stop.) If you don't believe the numbers, why use them?

If you have to write fluff ...

Bad things happen on the weekend feature piece front:

It was cloudy and cold at Sunday’s St. Patrick’s Parade in downtown Detroit, but for thousands of revelers who turned out for the 53rd annual event, it might as well have been sunny and warm.

Or not. It's still "March" out there: a high of 40 in downtown Detroit on Sunday, a high of 45 in Dublin. What, you were expecting the tropics?

“This is beautiful weather,” beamed Patrick McQueeny, a Clinton Township lawyer who served as a parade marshal.

Bzzzzt! Never -- that's never, as in "never" -- use a verb that doesn't describe the physical act of speech to attribute a direct quote. "Said" and "asked" worked for Raymond Chandler. They will work for you too.
Read more »

The strange syntax of news

We've talked about this before, right? The unholy collision of attribution -- which we like, because it helps keep us from being sued,  amen -- with time prepositions, in such a way that the attribution gets in the way of the action? Like these?

A would-be carjacker is dead after police said he was shot and killed by the person whose car he was trying to take on Detroit's west side.

A Canton man is facing charges after police said he fired two rounds from a high-powered rifle into a fireplace in his home in the 2300 block of Amber Street on Monday, prompting his two roommates to flee.

Two Detroit youths — one a student at Ferndale’s alternative high school for troubled youths — face preliminary exams Thursday after police said school officials followed them from campus to see them break into a home and steal two large televisions.

Daniel Ray Aderhold was arraigned this afternoon in 19th District Court on the charge after police said he allegedly* fatally attacked Perry Lee Beaubien by beating him in the head after the two had an argument.

None of these things happened "after" the cops said something, strictly put. They happened after someone did something criminal, and "police said" is there because ... attribution! We're not reporting something we witnessed; we're reporting what we were told. Conveniently, if we note that "police said" it, we're also wrapping ourselves in the blanket of privilege, which allows us to repeat a defamatory statement with impunity, owing to the circumstances in which it was made. "Smith hit Jones upside the head with a 2x4, police said" is protected in a way that "Smith hit Jones, a perpetually irritated neighbor tells EyeWitlessNews."

So "after" and "police said" don't have the same sort of syntactic relationship that preposition and clause do in "after the ball was over" or "after you've gone." "After police said" is a craft routine. It's short for "something happened after something else in more or less the order we're telling you, but for safety's sake, we're going to stick the attribution** in the middle." It's pretty harmless when you get used to it, but every now and then you get one that's actually ambiguous:

A Melvindale teen said she consumed Four Loko*** before she said she was sexu­ally assaulted last month.

"She said" is there for a good reason. We weren't there, and we don't know what happened, so we're going to signal our uncertainty. But grammar has us in a bit of a trap here. "Before" could reasonably go with "said," suggesting that the accuser was drunk when she made the assertion, or with the sexual assault.

This would have been a nice chance for an editor to step in and untangle the robotic writing. We're asking a lot when we expect readers to infer all the coded signals we send.

* Sigh. As a rule, the cops don't say someone "allegedly" did it; they say he did it, leaving it to the reporters to throw in "allegedly" in the vain hope that it might guard them from a lawsuit or make them look old and wise.
** Why don't writers simply set the attribution off with commas? ("Smith was arrested after, police said, she emptied a magazine into her former employer's trailer"). Too much work, and it isn't the way we've always done it, so there.
*** It'd be more complete to note that the accuser testified that she had been mixing it first with rum and later with cognac, but that doesn't go as well with the narrative of this story.