Martinis, steaks and cold-blooded belles

So with the UN slapping America in the face, Republicans finally wising up to the Kenyan usurper's Mideast perfidy and Massster's beautiful tax cuts held hostage by those pesky budget rules, what do you figure should have been the world's fourth most important story on Thursday afternoon?

Aw, you peeked. Having done so, though, you might have wondered how the elements of this story fell into place so naturally, so let's have a look:

She’ll drink to that!

The Latvian woman who watched her fiancé drown in the Hudson River walked out of prison Thursday — and celebrated with a martini and steak lunch.

There's no "police said" or "according to eyewitnesses" or "Fox News can reveal" (though there is that delicate accent on "fiancé," in case you've forgiven the French for anything in the past few decades). But there is an outline of the structure under which we're supposed to understand stuff. "Walked out of prison Thursday" is an easy claim to verify. "Martini and steak lunch" is close, but .. hang on a little and we'll get back to the martinis. "Celebrated" is actually a bit different from what you see in sports photo captions, where at least people are usually jumping up and down or something. As for who's drinking to what -- well, you can't call it a lie, because there's nothing for it to be true or false about. It's a framing device. It doesn't tell you what to think, but it tells you how to think about the things you're poised to learn.

Watching one's fiance drown, of course, is substantially different from drowning one's fiance; both have the makings of a good country song, but to make sense of the second paragraph, you need to know in advance that this isn't your ordinary Latvian woman. She's the one ... oh, come on, you read about it a couple years ago, it's on the tip of your tongue, she's the one in that story! So now you're ready to look at how tabloids make news. Indeed, let's just go ahead and shift over to the New York Post, the Murdoch stablemate from which Fox appropriated this story:

The part that Fox added to the hed -- the steak dinner -- seems to be the better attested,* but what the heck. How many martinis, and how do we know?
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Boundary violations

The fun thing about watching Fox isn't waiting someone at Fox to break the "rules"; it's trying to figure out what Fox's rules are from how Fox breaks other people's rules. So what are the circumstances under which Sunday morning's top story becomes "Trump will take care of it"? Apparently not the lede:

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster says neither the American people nor U.S. allies should question the stability of the Trump administration amid his predecessor Michael Flynn’s guilty plea and rumors Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is stepping down.

 “No, I don't think our allies need any reassurance,” McMaster told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” “In fact, what we're doing is continuing to work with them on all the key challenges we face today -- from North Korea, to the defeat of ISIS across the Greater Middle East -- the ongoing efforts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, too.” 

So ... there must be a lot to talk about.

... Wallace also asked McMaster about the president’s recent retweets of online posts linked to “Britain First,” a far-right group in the United Kingdom.

... “General, why did President Trump send out those videos?” Wallace asked.

“Well, President Trump is the best judge of why he did that,” McMaster said. “I know it was his intention to highlight the importance of creating safe and secure environments for our citizens -- to make sure that we have the right laws in place, enforcement mechanisms in place.”

370 words in, we get to the point(ish):

McMaster also addressed North Korea.

Last week, North Korea launched its longest-range intercontinental ballistic missile – a provocation to which President Trump replied, “I will only tell you that we will take care of it.” 

How exactly would the president “take care of it” given China and Russia’s complicity in propping up the regime, Wallace asked.

“Well, the president's going to take care of it by, if we have to, doing more ourselves,” McMaster said. “But what we want to do is convince others it is in their interest to do more. 

Under the standard rules of hed writing, we could at best get a week-old "Trump says 'we will take care of' North Korea." It'd be a stretch to draw "McMaster says Trump will take care of North Korea," because McMaster only vaguely says that.* And since the first few paragraphs (and the point of the interview) seem to point to concerns about whether the president is actually deranged or just acting like it, one wonders why North Korea was the headline at all.

It's a challenge keeping up with Fox and its masters these days; even if you manage to skip from one international nightmare to another, there's something new on the domestic scene. But if you want to climb the Fox ladder quickly, it's hard to go wrong with "Massster will fix it! Massster has everything under control!"

* Nor does he seem to be the one who said “I will only tell you that we will take care of it.” 

News and propaganda

Here's an interesting bit of evidence in the ongoing debate about whether Fox News is fundamentally a news organization or a propaganda organization. Revisions to GDP estimates are a fairly routine sort of story. They aren't emergencies or surprises; they happen at regular times in regular places, and, like sporting events, their news value depends in part on how much the actual outcome diverges from the expected outcome.*

What distinguishes this example is not the data itself but the way it's categorized for Fox readers. GDP growth is an objective element in the happiest sense of the term: there's an agreed definition and way of measuring it, so you can report it without accusations of bias. But at Fox, it's not a biz story or an economy story or a national story; it's placed under "politics."

Notice something else? Comments are enabled. Readers don't get the chance to "speak up" or "join the conversation" on every story at Fox, as they do at many other news outlets. I don't know if anyone's established a conclusive pattern yet, but it looks as if Fox doesn't bother with comments on stories that don't fit a kind of ritualistic, let's-sit-at-the-bar-and-bitch-about-the-old-days function.

The capture above shows no comments so far. If I were the betting sort, I'd bet that the first comments would be from these general categories:

How's that HOPE and CHANGE working out for you now?
10% unemployment doesn't feel like a "recovery" to me.
Worst and most corrupt administration in history.

For you media-effects fans out there (or Language Log visitors who kept up with the weekend's framing discussion), this is a highly testable bit of media framing: Does it make a difference in attitudes or depth of processing to categorize a GDP story as "politics" rather than "economics"? Under the right circumstances, it probably does. I don't think Fox knows that, in the sense that it hasn't tested the effect among 160 extra-credit-seeking undergraduates in a survey class somewhere, but that doesn't mean it isn't a deliberate ideological choice.

* NB: The story has moved up to the No. 2 position, with the hed "3Q Growth Marred By GDP Slowdown." As is often the case at Fox, it's hard to tell whether the hed reflects dishonesty or simple incompetence. The GDP didn't "slow down"; it didn't increase as much as the initial estimate had suggested. Funny thing is that at Fox, that category of error only happens on one side of the aisle.

Why we have the rule

A Charlotte businessman was murdered Friday morning on Independence Boulevard, the victim of an apparent robbery.

The basic rule: It's a murder when a jury says it's a murder. Until then, it's a "killing" (a homicide, if all the cops on that shift are monolingual in Latin) or -- nice blanket term -- a "death." Murder is a legal term for a particular kind of killing. Until that determination is made, you run a risk (ranging from smaller to larger, but never nonexistent) of being wrong when you decide to narrow down the broad category of homicide to the kind you think sounds good in a lede.

Arguments for the freewheeling use of "murder" come in two basic flavors:
1) Murder sounds more dramatic than "killing" or "death"! Funny, most people manage to sustain a reasonable level of interest when "found dead of a gunshot wound" occurs in their neighborhood or parking deck. How badly do you want to write a correction?
2) But [star columnist's name here] gets paid to call 'em like he sees 'em! Well, opinion is free, facts are sacred; how's it going with that correction?

Does it seem as if we're harping too much on that tiny risk of being wrong? Let's see:
A Charlotte man shot to death Friday morning in the Independence Towers parking lot was not the victim of a robbery but of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police now say.

"Police now say" is a little disingenuous. In the first story, the only elements attributed to the cops were "found lying in the parking lot" and "had been shot sometime around 9:35 a.m." Even the paper's "news partner" wrote "was shot to death Friday morning* during an apparent robbery, police said." (Don't you love the passive voice?)

There's more to this than one overeager blunder, though. Let's shift gears for a second and look at a story discussed on the editor's blog:

Q:You usually allow reader comments for stories posted on your Web site. But that's not the case with the coverage of the Skipper Beck prostitution story. Was this an oversight, or deliberate decision not to let readers weigh in?
A: We really like for readers to weigh in on the stories we post. But some topics consistently attract lewd, obscene or otherwise inappropriate comments. So, when such topics surface, we are faced with either constantly monitoring the comments or simply skipping the commenting function on a particular story. Prostitution, as you might imagine, is one of those topics. In the case of Skipper Beck, it quickly became clear that a few readers were determined to post offensive remarks.

Mr. Beck, if you're scoring along at home, runs a Mercedes dealership. You can see why, despite the paper's fascination with all the fallout from this high-end prostitution ring thing, you'd want to disable comments. What sort of comments showed up on the purported Independence Boulevard murder?

I am working as hard as I can to get my family back to the west coast. With the make up of this city and what I see comming down. I just do not want to live in the south anymore !

We all know these guns are illegal, being used by gun toting felons, the Drug Dealers are selling them with the Drugs Many Imported underground from Mexico, they are noted for their drug /weapon imports and human trafficking.

That one was from a poster whose earlier comment was deleted as "abusive." I don't know what that category covers, but here are a few comments I'd nominate from the TV station's story:

the media could help by posting descriptions of these animals. ever heard of america's most wanted? the liberal media is more interested in trying to hide the fact that there is an epidemic of black crime, expecially black against white crime, in charlotte. they care more about appearing as good little knee jerk lock step liberals than in helping the law abiding people of charlotte.

these creatures have taken over our streets. our justice system is a joke. if something does not change soon, we are headed for total anarchy. when that happens, the US will surely crumble. when and if they catch this creature, i wonder what race it will be? i think we already know the answer. these types of creatures need to be removed from our society. sounds barbaric? it is! and it is the only option we have if we want to take back our country.

Not to be blunt, but if you haven't noticed yet that stories about violent crime in Charlotte inevitably attract comment from the sort of bottom-feeding droolers who seem "determined to post offensive remarks" like these, you haven't been paying attention -- or, at least, you haven't been paying attention to stories that aren't about rich white guys who sell Benzes. Does it take a blunder on the cop beat to bring home the painfully obvious point that the comment feature ought to be disabled on all news stories, permanently, without exceptions?

It's clear that the Independence death story isn't racist in intent; it isn't the paper's fault that it has a bunch of unreconstructed swine among its readers. But it's racist in result, particularly in context of the prostitution story, and that's a pretty good argument for (a) professional caution in cop reporting and (b) an immediate end to the idea that reader comments are worth adding to news coverage.

* The hed does say "murdered"; let's not give the TV folks too much credit.