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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Today in exactitude

Let's not get into the habit of banning parts of speech or anything around here, but you do have to admit that large parts of CNN would do better if they weren't allowed to use adverbs without adult supervision. Hence, we have more than a culinary interest in how exact the "exactly" is in "exactly how long." But first, some writering:

Like an inbox filled with emails about Black Friday sales, the one thing you can count on the day after Thanksgiving is a fridge packed with leftovers.

For many, this is easily the best part of the entire holiday -- but at a certain point, even the most devoted leftovers fans will question if that side dish is still OK to eat. 

Shall we start with a biscuit conditional?

Hmm. Any chance of a little more precision?

Ham
Keeps for: Three to four days

Mashed and sweet potatoes
Keeps for: Three to four days

Stuffing/dressing and gravy
Keeps for: Three to four days

But don't get the idea that they're just mailing it it:

Cranberry sauce
Keeps for: 10 to 14 days
Green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese and corn pudding
Keeps for: Three to five days

Hang on for an "about a week," if you want. But as is so often the case in life and cooking, the results are just as good if you start by leaving the adverbs out.

Now let's not always see the same hands

It seems like we just went over this last week, but:

1) Tune TV to CNN
2) Sit in front of TV

Does that cover it? I don't want to have to put this on the final.

The detainee of Zenda

Dear CNN: Given that your own coverage from earlier in the day referred to the prisoner as a "prisoner," is there some particular reason you thought "detainee" was the appropriate term for a hed on the verdict? That's some Fox-level pandering:

 ... though even Fox manages to call him a "prisoner" today. (Fox does get some sort of prize for using "detainee" in the lede of one trial story while quoting a witness as saying "prisoner" in the second graf.)

If you retain some fear from the second Bush presidency that "prisoner" had some specific meaning that ruled out those captured on the battlefield, or those held behind barbed wire in what you describe as a "prison yard":

... it's time to get over it.

In today's story, there would have been nothing wrong with "captive." Or "ISIS fighter." Or "captive ISIS fighter." Any of them could alternate with, or substitute for, "prisoner" with no risk of Elongated Yellow Fruit syndrome. But "detainee" should have been out of bounds in 2001, and it's far out of bounds now.

The universal language

The police tape saga is a topic of perpetual interest here, but I think this one's a genuine first: the generic "POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS" image illustrating a story from a non-English-speaking country.

A number of other points about the story are worth raising, of course: why it's the top among the day's "top stories"; why "couple" is both singular and plural in the same hed; and why an update that leads with the officially determined cause of death still includes this graf toward the end:

Hotel staff contacted local authorities. The cause of their death is not yet known, but their bodies have been transported to the Dominican National Institute of Forensic Sciences for an exam. The spokesman said blood-pressure medication was found in the room. 

But the generic crime scene tape is really the star of the show. Here's the One Weird Thing You Need To Know about that: Generic photos tend to make people think the writing is worse. (Yes, independently of separate measures that ask directly about the writing.) The effects are squishier and more contingent on perceptions of credibility and objectivity.** If the Elongated Yellow Police Tape has actually become the international symbol of Random Crime For Which We Can't Be Bothered To Find A Photo, though, we've probably turned a corner.

* The AP Stylebook's guidance on this topic is pretty useful.
** Come see us in Toronto in August to hear all about it.

Open dictionary. Consult dictionary. Start over.

Sigh. Dear CNN: Did you mean in the sense of the OED's "to lend or add grace to (a person or thing); to adorn, embellish, set off," or did you have something else in mind with "graces"?

What the "second most talked-about politician in America" is doing in the headline is anyone's guess. The Time story doesn't seem to offer any evidence for that, but CNN is hardly the first outfit to repeat a bogus (or, more kindly, "unsupportable") claim in a headline. The real problem, though, is the verb. When the bad guys are going to blast away at your librul bias every chance they get, is there some specific reason you think it's a good idea to gift-wrap more ammunition and send it to them?

Do you speak American?

Like it or not, the local treasure that is the Duke-Carolina rivalry* has gone national on us (which is one reason it's so often afflicted with Dick Vitale). But one doesn't have to speak a particular regional American dialect to wonder where CNN is phoning this one in from. The online hed might have been a giveaway, had you stumbled there first:

Amazon pirates are ruthless and all that, but I don't recall much transitive scuppering from my years of reading American sports pages. On to the text:

A star-studded crowd including former US President Barack Obama had gathered to watch hotly tipped college basketball player Zion Williamson, but the 18-year-old's night unraveled after just 33 seconds when his Nike shoe fell apart. 

Likewise "hotly tipped." You could at this point also wonder how the "star-studded crowd" of the lede became the "star-studded match" of the hed, but that risks taking our eye off a different ball. Do you suppose some of the star-studded crowd (Obama, for example) might have actually been there to, you know, watch Carolina and Duke play? But onward:

... Tickets for the local derby were reportedly available for over $3,000 and freshman forward Williamson -- described by double NBA champion Kevin Durant as a "once-in-a-generation athlete" -- was a big reason for the inflated prices.

Williamson's top-ranked Duke side was on a nine-match winning streak, but without their 285-pound 6 feet 8 inch star player the Blue Devils fell to a 88-72 defeat Wednesday.

No, no and no. "Derby" for "any kind of important sporting contest" (as the OED tells it) appears to be exclusively British. We can do "our side" or "their side," but the definite "side" -- as in "Group F's top and bottom sides" is also "chiefly Brit." And those things with 20 minutes to the half are games, not matches. (And if you can hyphenate one number compound, you can hyphenate another, and let's not forget the delightfully blown participle in the second graf: "Williamson ... went down hard when his shoe split in half while planting his foot.")

We should expect things to be different in different Englishes, and toy departments everywhere will always provide their own delights. (I affirm that my life is richer for the British sports phrase "banana skin," but I wouldn't bet on me to use it correctly in a headline.) But could we at least raise the possibility that CNN misunderstood both its audience and its story here?

I raise the latter point because of this follow-up, which suggests why news organizations tend to be easy prey for practitioners of fake news:

Nike is playing damage control after Duke basketball phenom Zion Williamson tore his sneaker in a game Wednesday evening.

Nike's (NKE) stock was down more than 1% on Thursday. Nike builds its reputation around creating premier shoes and clothes for athletes, but that image took a hit with Williamson's sneaker snafu. 

That's the sort of combination of evidence and guesswork that leaves you open to claims that we have the Greatest. Economy. Evar. And indeed, if you overlook the baseline and increments on the Y-axis, it looks like a case for damage control:

One of the nice things about the CNN site, though: it provides the context that the reporters don't seem interested in: whether Thursday's decline (1.05%) is a lot, a little, or sort of in-between. Here's Nike for the past month:

We don't seem to be seeing much hair-pulling over a similar one-day decline at Raytheon:

... or Martin Marietta:

"True" is a necessary condition of news, but it's not always a sufficient one. If a change of 1% in a stock price isn't a story most times it happens, why are we sure it's a story just because we can run a picture that -- curse the phrase -- "went viral"?

* How old is Your Editor? "Drop-add means standing in line for 80-column punch cards in the Tin Can in August" years old.

Forget flood. Interview ... no, don't

Often, the best answer to a Stupid Question is "no, but thanks for asking." That won't work in this case, because the problem isn't that the hed is asking a question that the story answers; it's asking a question before which journalism must either stand mute or, you know, break out the tools of the supernatural. And that way lies witch-burning.

Earlier this week, the Christian Broadcasting Network's chief political analyst teed up a question for White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders.

"Does it kind of blow your mind that someone like Donald Trump, who is sitting in the Oval Office," said CBN's David Brody, "I know you can list the accomplishments, but at the same time just from a spiritual perspective, there are a lot of Christians who believe that for such a time as this ..."

"For such a time as this" is the key phrase in that sentence. It's a quotation from the Bible's Book of Esther, in which an unlikely savior delivers the Jews from persecution.

Sanders picked up on Brody's biblical implication and ran with it.

"I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times," said Sanders, an evangelical Christian herself. "And I think he wanted Donald Trump to become president and that's why he's there."

While Sanders' statement may have raised secular Americans' eyebrows, many white evangelicals likely agree with her. According to a 2017 survey by Public Religion Research Institute, more than half (57%) say God played a "major role" in the 2016 presidential election.

If your eyebrows haven't already been raised by Axis Sarah, it's hard to see why this would get their attention. But you might have also gathered that you're not going to get the interview that the headline promised.

That view is particularly pronounced among charismatic and Pentecostal Christians, a subset of evangelicalism that puts special emphasis on prophecies, believing that God is omnipotent, immanent and extremely active. That is, all-powerful and present in all areas of existence.

The fullest accounting of this view comes in Stephen Strang's book "God and Donald Trump," in which the Pentecostal publisher writes that evangelicals had been praying for deliverance from an overbearing, hostile (and Democratic) federal government.

Trump, Strang says, was the answer to their prayers.
 
... But if a majority of Trump's white evangelical base believes that God wanted him to be president, many other Christians do not agree.

Less than half of non-white Protestants (47%) and fewer than a quarter of white mainline Protestants (21%) and Catholics (22%) say God played a major role in the 2016 election, according to the PRRI survey.

Now we're getting somewhere (not, of course, into answering the Stupid Question), but we're straying off into guesswork to do so. These are questions about what people think God did, not what people think God wanted. Specifically,  about what English-speaking Protestants (with a side of Catholics) think, and that seems a rather narrow view of the interaction of religion and politics.

To some extent, the question of God's role in the 2016 election is impossible to answer. After all, who among us can claim to know the mind of God? 

If you need your religion editor to point out that -- with some qualifications, mind -- we can't entirely answer what God was up to in the 2016 election, you're doing it wrong. (Hell, we can't entirely answer what the Russians were up to, and Russia's on the map.) And quite a few among us feel that life is but a joke claim to know the mind of God. Traditionally, we ask them to buy an ad.

If you want to analyze public opinion, fine. Just keep the emphasis on questions that were actually asked -- and entities that actually pick up the phone.

Down with pronouns

Is it too much to ask? Let pronouns be pronouns, and let antecedents -- even the first-out-of-the-cliche-bag ones like "missing teen" and "abductor" -- do the heavy lifting in headlines? I know all the cool kids these days are writing deliberately vague heds, but come on. Even Fox (despite the adjective overload and the little oops with the "allegedly" thing; compare top and bottom) did better:

Back to CNN, though: Further points off for any headline that begins with "What we know about" or ends with "Here's what we know." Forbidden under all circumstances, at least until a neighbor has described the suspect as a quiet fella who kept to himself. And don't say "Here's a photo of ..." when what you have is a link, especially when it's a link to the same photo you've already shown.

If it's the first thing that comes to mind ...

Let me be the first to admit a little get-off-my-lawnism here: I like headlines that tell you what happened, and I'm thoroughly conditioned to prefer them in the present tense to signal the since-our-last-bulletin timeliness of news. At the same time, I realize that I'm not anyone's target demographic anymore (except maybe Fox's, and one or the other of us is making a pretty drastic mistake in that case). Still, isn't there a case to be made for holding the "just got" construction to, maybe, one of the three display headlines here? The general principle being that if it's the first thing that comes to mind, the editor should lie down and wait for a second thing to come to mind.

Just to be even-handed here, a few more illustrations of the principle:

What's more Fox than sparking a backlash? Actually several things, which we'll try to get to in a bit, but meanwhile, here's another case (slightly down the page) of falling for the first thing that comes to mind:

Please stop. Think of the children.

Random babbling about innocent numbers

What's entertaining about the CNN polling analysis on Sunday morning's home page isn't whether it slips on a statistical banana peel or two, but how much of it bears any resemblance to things that actually happen in the political ecosystem. Shall we?

Poll of the week: A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows 50% of voters prefer November's election to result in a Democratic-controlled Congress compared with 42% of voters who prefer a Republican-controlled Congress.

I don't love the syntax; I'd go with "prefer that November's election result in ..." if some editor insisted that you can't say "want November's election to produce," but  it's not completely out of bounds for "what is your preference for the outcome of this November's congressional election."*

This result is in-line with other polls from NBC News/Wall Street Journal and from other generic ballot polls more generally. 

True so far, despite the irrelevant hyphen in "in-line." Since December in this poll, the result for Democrats has ranged from 47% to 50%; for Republicans, from 39% to 43%. "More generally" is sort of what "other generic ballot polls" means, but that's copy-editing, not reality vs. unreality. Which gets us to the paragraph reproduced above, which needs to be gone through more carefully.

At the most basic level, the generic ballot can be seen as an estimation of the House popular vote. 

Technically ... yeah, that's what the question tries to estimate. Whether it produces as good an estimation as "If the election for Congress were held today, would you vote for [ROTATE] the Democratic candidate in your district or the Republican candidate in your district?"** is another matter, but the sentence is misleading for a different reason. There's no Electoral College for the House; the "popular vote" is the only kind we have.

Given where the generic ballot average is at this point (an 8-point Democratic advantage), there is roughly an 6 to 8 point margin of error in predicting the final vote.

Wrong on multiple counts. By "generic ballot average," the writer may mean the RealClearPolitics average for generic ballot questions, which at this writing is given as 8.4 points. That "average," of course, is not a meaningful number; you could use a weighted mean to smooth out the eight different sample sizes it represents (RCP doesn't), but that doesn't cover the different populations sampled (registered voters vs. likely voters) or the different questions asked. "If the election were held today ..." and "what is your preference for ..." look like they're tapping the same sentiment, but still: You can't average the results of different questions. That's literally cheating.

The so-called "average" doesn't have a "margin of error," and RCP doesn't claim that it does, but if it did, the "margin" wouldn't be affected to that degree by the difference in proportions or by the time represented "at this point."*** Even if there was a meaningful "average," it wouldn't affect the "margin of error" as claimed. The difference in proportions is represented in the numerator of ((p)(1-p))/n, of which we take the square root to get a standard error of proportion. The 50% Democrat result in the NBC/WSJ sample produces a margin of error of 3.3 points at 95% confidence;**** the margin on the Republican result is 3.2. And the "margin of error" isn't related to the "final vote," which doesn't happen until 10 weeks after the survey concluded. We report sampling error because we can measure it, but we can't measure biases like nonreponse or social desirability. Fabricating a "margin" that apparently accounts for biases like those is just blowing smoke.

In other words, Democrats end up winning by double digits or roughly tied with Republicans. That's far from perfect, though is actually more predictive than an average for a Senate race would be at this point.  

If there was a "margin of error" involved here, that's just about exactly the opposite of how it would work. Assuming a 6-point lead and a 6-point margin, nonchance results could include either a double-digit win or a tie -- but those are the far ends of the distribution, and the bulk of findings from repeated samples would cluster around the actual population results and slope downward from there.

I don't know what is meant by "actually more predictive than an average for a Senate race," except that "at this point" has nothing to do with that, either. It may reflect a concern about the disproportion in how many people a Senate seat represents (say, between Montana and California), but individual statewide polls would be very good representations of Senate races -- to the extent that hypothetical questions are predictive. Why an "average" is relevant here ... SQUIRREL!

... The exact margin though is likely to be smaller than we thought it would be at the beginning of the cycle. It may be closer to 6 points than 8 points. And while 6 is still significantly greater than 0, it's much more doable than 8.

OK, I guess we're going to give up on the copyediting altogether.  But to the broader concern, CNN is more or less just making it up at this point. It's fun to make fun of Fox News, because Fox as a whole is so desperately a tool of the Trump wing of the Republican Party, but when it comes to straight-up reporting of survey results, Fox continues to err on the side of accurate and dispassionate. Why CNN thinks it needs to analyze public opinion by producing random, poorly punctuated babbling about innocent numbers is beyond me, but it does suggest that you should use CNN's polling analyses for entertainment value only.


* Yes, the noun modifier should be "Democrat-controlled," but the burnt hand dreads cold water.
** The phrasing is Fox's.
*** The timing could certainly affect the prospective "If the election were held today" question if it was after a primary, rather than before.
**** For convenience, it's common to use .25 as the numerator, because that produces the largest possible margin of error for any proportion from the sample. A 70-30 split on a question would produce a margin of error (95% confidence) of 3 points, rather than 3.3, with the same sample. And always report those confidence levels, kids!

Four shalt thou not count

Dear CNN: Do you suppose arithmetic ought to be one of those Five Things "you need to know to Get Up to Speed and Out the Door"?

If you're on the edge of your seat with the home version of our game there, yes. There is a Door No. 5:

Not that I'd mind if it was getting harder, but no, it doesn't feel like that, and if it did, it probably would be my imagination (though the water did show up straw-free at the local last week, huzzah). I'm not in Seattle, and it isn't 2020. This, kids, is why we try to avoid addressing the reader directly.

And this one is kind of the last straw, though it's actually the first, being why I clicked on the damn story in the first place:

See, in the old days, once you got to five or six or seven things you had to know to get out the door that day, you drew them on a "dummy" and called it the "front page." Do you sort of see how that might be an improvement?

Calls make claim

Want to take a swing at what the hed means without reading the story?

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Today in exegesis

And what would be some examples, Nation's News Leader?

Yet few presidents embodied the biblical concept of “com- forting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable” as much as Roosevelt, who once called the heartless business tycoons of his day “the money changers” in the temple.

Or as the Book of Joseph tells us, freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

"Comfort the afflicted," in its various forms, is generally attributed to the columnist Finley Peter Dunne, writing in his "Mr. Dooley" persona (you may agree that Dooley's supposed Irish dialect is part of Dunne's "wit and charm," or you may quietly pound nails into your skull). But this generalized ignorance of the subject matter isn't the main reason serious news organizations shouldn't inject themselves into the world of religion.

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You can see how they might

How are things in Grand Rapids there, Most Trusted Name in News?

Police in Grand Rapids, Michigan, have surrounded a suspect who is believed to have killed seven people in two shootings, including one child, police spokesman Jon Wu said Thursday.

Police say they believe the two shootings are related.

You think?

Hed of the week

In case you haven't seen this gem from cnnmoney yet-- cheers!

It's actually the hed of the previous week, in that it appears to have remained up since early  Saturday afternoon. But who's counting?

Why we (used to) have editors

Dear CNN:

No, it isn't. It's nowhere near that. I hardly know where to start with this one, but you have to start* somewhere, so -- no.

Even if the hed hadn't overstated our household April gasoline cost by a factor of five or more, that's not the "monthly" bill. The point of the story, to the extent that it has one, is that rising prices produced a certain national average for April. The monthly bill for 2011 would be lower, and the monthly bill for academic year 2010-2011 would be lower still. If you have some reason to think April was typical, you sort of ought to tell us. But that points to a different issue, so let's look at the prose itself:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Round-trip airfare from New York to Los Angeles. More than a dozen dinners for two at Applebee's. Two 16 GB iPod nanos.

These are just a few of the things you could have bought if you weren't spending $368.09 a month on gasoline.

See above: I'm not, and the amount I spent in April 2011 isn't an accurate reflection of my spending "a month" anyway. But there's a larger and stupider assumption in play. I'm happy to stipulate that it's possible to buy a ticket for a round-trip cross-country flight for $368, but I was buying gasoline in March too -- and in February and January and December. So it isn't as if I'm giving away two iPods a month that I wasn't giving away before. The April-to-April difference in dinners for two at Applebee's is less than four.
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Why I hate polls

And what's the powerful social science tool of survey research up to over at the Most Trusted Name in News?

Of all the newspaper headlines covering the death of Osama bin Laden, the most provocative may have been the New York Daily News.

And I care because ...?

Their "Rot in Hell" Monday headline, with a full front-page photo of bin Laden, was mentioned by the cable news networks and generated buzz on the on-line social networks.

Oh, come on. It isn't even that original. "Burn in Hell" was in the News's frontpage hed for the February 2008 decision on a capital trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Your point is ...?

So do Americans think that the founder and leader of the al Qaeda terrorist network is now in hell?
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On clues and having them

For those of you who plan to be around in April 2015 for the gala HeadsupTheBlog 10th anniversary festivities -- be advised that we have a lot of "Christmas came early" and "Bowled over" and "gestures as she reacts" and "Guilty! That's what the man said he wasn't Thursday" to get through between now and then. Because some stuff never seems to go away.

As in the example here, which -- has it been four years since the same thing came up?* Yes, and the answer is still the same: Nothing. It isn't. (The hed at issue then was "Why is April a month of tragedies?") There isn't. Go find something else to write about.

The word, alas, doesn't seem to have reached CNN**:

Is there something about this time of the year that makes these types of attacks more prevalent?

No. Which should be the end of the story, but ...
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2 steps forward, 1.634 steps back

OK, maybe you saw this one filleted at the Log, if not on Comedy Central: an "unusually content- less" bit of pseudo-observation masquerading as political analysis. Couldn't agree more; after all, it's the million-word dude, getting some more free advertising for his bogus linguistifying. You might have missed the folo (shown below, and posted at 10:20p Thursday), which continues to kick the fundamentals around the infield but does show a promising flash or two.

Here's the original lede:

President Obama's speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.

Rly?

Tuesday night's speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.

Not to recap the Log's analysis or anything, but large buzzers should be going off in your head at this point. Paul J.J. Payack isn't a language analyst; he's a hack who runs a for-profit company specializing in Wizard of Oz jiggery-pokery that's designed to keep your attention away from the shell game. If you needed another hint, you might notice that he's talking about speech but using a measure of writing. Speech. Writing. Different. Good so far?

Why is he an expert for CNN? Well, because they've called him one before. (Nor is CNN alone; the NYT has fallen for the schtick too, though it's also been professional enough to quote experts debunking the more openly fraudulent claims.) Note how different things look a few hours later, though:

Language experts weighed in Thursday after poring over the nearly 2,700 words of President Obama's Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil disaster.

"It was straightforward and easy to understand," said Ron Yaros, assistant professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, referring to the explanations of the crisis and its possible solutions. He divided the speech into 1,200 "idea units," each of which represents a point the president was trying to make.

..."If you look at the entire speech, and you look at the amount of jargon, it came out to 1.5 percent," he said.

But Obama's speech may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday by Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor.

Real analysis comes ahead of fake analysis. Good start. But there's more!

Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence "added some difficulty for his target audience," Payack said.

Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, was unimpressed with Payack's criticism of the sentence length.

"I think we can all agree that those are shockingly long professor-style sentences for a president to be using, especially in addressing the nation after a disaster," Liberman wrote on his blog.

"Why, they were almost as long as the ones that President George W. Bush, that notorious pointy-headed intellectual, used in his 9/15/2005 speech to the nation about Hurricane Katrina, where I count 3,283 words in 140 sentences, for an average of 23.45 words per sentence! And we all remember how upset the press corps got about the professorial character of that speech!"

Yaros challenged the value of Payack's analysis. "There's a tremendous amount of difference between analyzing the written word and interpreting the spoken word," said Yaros, a former science reporter who studies how to make complex topics understandable.

See why the new hed is still misleading? Language mavens are people like Bill Safire: semi-enlightened amateurs who may or may not be hiding an ideological ax behind their analysis. (I don't know who holds Payack's partisan leash, but as we've noted here before, he's no neutral observer of political language.) These aren't dueling "language mavens"; two people who have a clue about the topic at hand are dissecting the shell game of someone who manifestly doesn't. Nor are they trading words; the real experts are coming in after the fact to address the damage done by building a single-source story around a "language maven."

It's an improvement, no question. You can't read the rewrite and come away with a good impression of the original analysis. But it's not a cure. We're still stuck in the Iben Browning pattern of "dueling science": One side says the moon is made of green cheese; the other says it's a lifeless, airless rock; and our hed says "Scientists Spar About Nature of Moon." CNN needs to prune the Rolodex of all purveyors of junk empiricism, and the Global Language Monitor is a good place to start.