Antepenultimatum

I'm not sure I could even name a favorite A.J. Liebling column.* Last couple decades, I've been much more in the "what delicate filleting from seven decades ago does this bit of brain-dead yapping from Fox News remind me of the most?" Monday, it was "Antepenultimatum" (Sept. 27, 1946). 

Liebling's topic was a "conspicuously civilized note ... telling the Yugoslavs that if they didn't rurn loose the surviving occupants of two American planes shot down by them, the United States would complain to the Security Council." He likened this to threatening your obstreperous neighbor with a lawsuit, rather than threatening to break his neck: "An ultimatum, I had always understood, is a threat to break the neck. ... Serbia received an ultimatum from Austria in 1914."

Imagine my delight when Fox's No. 4 story Monday morning** (the above is from around 8 Eastern) proclaimed that Poland had announced plans to send the Leopard 2 main battle tank to Ukraine, despite Germany's interest in delaying: 

Morawiecki said Poland had been building a coalition of countries prepared to send Leopards to Ukraine even without approval from Germany.

"We will ask [Germany] for permission, but this is a secondary theme," Morawiecki said. "Even if, eventually, we do not get this permission, we — within this small coalition — even if Germany is not in this coalition, we will hand over our tanks, together with the others, to Ukraine."

Back to Liebling:

Journalists, and especially the fellows who write for the press assocations, have a habit of using the strongest word they can think of in the lead of a story, even when the word really means something else. Headline writers often base their eye-smackers on the strongest word in the lead. That's the only reason I can think of for the use of the word "ultimatum" in every New York newspaper on Thursday, August 22."

You can see why, after a dose of ULTIMATUM GIVES TITO 48 HOURS TO FREE FLYERS, YUGOS GET ULTIMATUM and the like, Liebling "felt like we had left the diving board and would hit the surface of the third World War any second." (And if you too had had enough of UKRAINE: WORLD WAR III OR COLD WAR II? by the end of February, I expect he was nodding along.)

The fun continued when the story moved into the lead around 10 a.m.:

Germany will not stop Poland from delivering Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, Germany's foreign minister announced Sunday.

If Germany has mastered time travel to the point where it can cave in on Sunday to the Monday ultimatum, the rest of NATO should worry a bit that it doesn't send the damn things back to, oh, October 1941 or so. But I digress.

Liebling took himself to the references, starting with "a ninety-five-cent dictionary which I bought one time in a cigar store and which gives only one meaning for each word" and ending with the 13-volume Oxford, which gave pretty much the explanation the OED has today: 

In diplomacy, the final terms presented by one power (or group of powers) to another, the rejection of which may lead to the severing of diplomatic relations, and eventually to a declaration of war.

Because the OED is a fine place to play "that's been a verb longer than Missouri has been a journalism school," the next entry (barely two years younger) is worth noting:

A final condition or stipulation; one's last word on a matter.

Not everything in news is subject to the sort of know-it-when-I-see-it framing contagion that makes for crises or tragedies. Newsrooms are -- usually -- still careful to look up "hurricane" or "blizzard" before declaring one, even if they're consistently careless with "hurricane-force winds." And terrorism is often carefully licensed; it's always worth noting when an outlet like Fox calls "terror" on its own and when it waits for permission. sLiebling suspects a form of the latter: "a State Department public-relations official who, asked at a press conference 'if it is all right to call this thing an 'ultimatum,' may have answered, 'Sure, boys, go ahead.'"

With all that logged in, though, there's a point to Libling's prescriptivism: " I fear that I detected, in their taking the gloomiest possible view of the situation, a certain eagerness on the part of most of the newspapers" -- evidenced by what he saw as the Mirror's later regret that the pesky Yugoslavs had complied. Given the choice between Media Conspiracy and Media Stupid, my money is usually on the latter, but when Fox is out ahead of the world on the ultimatum front, I'm always inclined to give the old guy a listen.

* Granted,it's hard to go wrong with "Offers and Demands" (Jan. 26, 1963), but look at the competition
** The story at the link has been updated, though it still has the "5:49 am" time stamp.

Grave league

So did the Fair 'n' Balanced network think "bigly" was an actual directive from the Dark Tower, rather than just a popular misreading of Master's voice? Has the party press decided to dispense with grammar altogether and instead communicate by means of farts and tap dancing? Or is something else afoot?

A U.S. Navy warship on Friday passed through waters claimed by China near disputed islands in the South China Sea, the Defense Department said, drawing Chinese condemnation.

A department spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Gary Ross, said the destroyer ship USS Decatur conducted the transit operation near the Paracel Islands. He said it was done "in a routine, lawful manner without ship escorts and without incident."

Let's not entirely let the AP off the hook. If "drawing Chinese condemnation" is supposed to go with "warship passed through waters claimed by China," the attribution is badly placed. (Since the US and China seem to agree on the basic sequence of events, we could simply leave it until the second graf.) And jargonizing isn't a sign of a healthy, independent press. File "conducted the transit operation" with "executed a search warrant"; if the cops searched a house, say so. But the hed is solely Fox:

A Chinese defense ministry statement called it "a gravely illegal act" and "intentionally provocative." The Chinese navy sent a guided missile destroyer and an escort vessel that "spotted and verified the American ships and warned them to leave," the statement said.

How we got a "'gravely' act" out of that is a question for the ages (though with Halloween at hand, maybe we could ask Sir Graves Ghastly). How we got the morning's top story is a different matter. Fox doesn't seem to know that this is the sort of thing that big powers do sometimes. If China puts up a "no smoking" sign at the Paracels, it should probably expect the occasional destroyer to stand next to the door and blow a little smoke inside. Which seems, literally, to be what got Drudge so excited last week:

Funny, whoever's taunting whom, it's still a sign of the Kenyan usurper's fecklessness. What do you say, Fox commenters?
Read more »

GOP Slams Kenyan Over (filename)

Now that they've gotten the message over at the New York Post and Sunday's 5 Dirtbags have become the Swap Jihadis (which is not actually a band name contest, see right, with a little Daily News bedwetting thrown in for good measure), it's worth a little look back at how some of today's salient news stories looked in the recent past.
 
For example, there's the Fair 'n' Balanced homepage on Jan. 16, shown above. And there's this AP story from April 24, noting that ... what's that, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif.?

"Given the significance and necessity for centralized command and control, which I have been informed is little to nonexistent, I urge you to seriously consider the idea of directing an individual to organize, manage and coordinate activity that involves multiple elements of the federal government working toward Bergdahl's release," wrote Hunter, a Marine veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan.

... A month after Lumpkin's appointment, Hunter wrote President Barack Obama, asking him to make the Defense Department the lead on all efforts to get Bergdahl back "with the specific aim of achieving a faster resolution than can be provided by the Department of State." He also asked Obama to name one coordinator to oversee the entire Bergdahl effort.
 
Interesting how that's worked out, isn't it? How do you suppose Fox readers were talking about the case a year ago* over at GretaWire?
Read more »

Today in cognitive dissonance

What are you supposed to make of the latest in Iranian maritime skulduggery, anyway: wave the flag a little harder, or buy more GOOOOLD and freeze-dried food for the survival bunker?

First up is the Fair 'n' Balanced Network's top story from Feb. 8:

A senior Iranian naval commander says his country has sent several warships to the Atlantic Ocean, close to U.S. maritime borders for the first time.

Which, if you're scoring along at home, is more or less the same AP story Fox ran on Jan. 21:

Two Iranian warships set sail Tuesday for the Atlantic Ocean on their navy's first-ever mission there, state TV reported.
Read more »