No, but thanks for asking

Today in Stupid Questions:

NORFOLK, Va. — Do you love Lucky Charms so much that you would like the marshmallowy cereal taste in your beer?

Smartmouth Beer is introducing its Saturday Morning Marshmallow IPA on March 2 in an all-day event that will also showcase trivia and food vendors.

Sad to note that this isn't technically an Elongated Yellow Fruit, in that "taste" isn't a variation on Lucky Charms. But ledewise, I hope we can agree that it fails the Wheaties test.

Double hat trick of iconic forbidden things

This is one of those issues you live for in Copy Editor Bingo: a Triple Forbidden Things Score on one page,  bisected by a Triple Forbidden Word Score running vertically through the A section.

At top, on the business front, there's a Stupid Question in the hed, followed by an "iconic" teeing up a perfectly formed Elongated Yellow Fruit in the second graf:

Called the "Sole of the UX," the tires were revealed at Elliott’s New York Fashion Week after-party on February 9. They were modeled after Elliott's AF1 shoe partnership with Nike. The iconic perforated leather shoes, which retail for $150 a pair, are sold out on Nike's website. 

What really makes the magic, though, is the intersecting iconic axis, starting on page 2A:

and going on to the second business page (12A):

 We're not in the word-banning business around here, really. But some shops can feel free to put particular words off limits until the susceptible get over it. In rule form, it goes something like: If you're tempted to call something "iconic," that's a sign that you don't need to.

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.

To get to the other side?

Even without the Stupid Question, this is a candidate for Least Informative Follow-up of the (no longer young) Year.  Let's proceed to the fourth paragraph:

Police confirmed Monday that a sixth Ram truck was found around 2:30 p.m. Saturday near Warren and Outer Drive in Dearborn Heights. No damage was done to the vehicle, according to the police report.
 

The other trucks have been found in Detroit, some stripped or damaged, some still in new condition. A pocket Bible was found on the driver's seat of one of the trucks.

Given that the "when" of Tuesday's story is "erm, Saturday," you can see leading with the Bible. (Assuming you didn't want to put any further effort into finding out about an arrest that apparently happened Saturday.) But before putting it in the headline, should we wonder for a moment if the pocket that the pocket Bible fell out of might have belonged to -- oh, a factory worker who parked the soon-to-be-stolen Ram?

Today in causality

Conspiracy theories are always bigger on the inside at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network:

Almost immediately after the Warren Commission in 1964 ruled that Oswald had been the lone gunman, conspiracy theories began to circulate over whether or not he had been the only shooter and if the CIA had been involved in the Kennedy assassination.

But before authorities were able to fully question Oswald, the former U.S. Marine was shot and killed on Nov. 24, 1963, by Texas nightclub owner Jack Ruby – adding more fuel to the speculative fire that the U.S. government was hiding what it knew about the assassination.

The future of forbidden heds

Well, speak of the devil and he will surely sneak over and put his beer bottles in your recycling. No sooner do we learn that the Freep can start bagging its copydesk operations late next year than two -- count 'em, two -- Forbidden Heds show up on the front page.

First up, a double-dip on the Stupid Question: not just using the question mark as a hedge, but forming the question in a flagrantly ungrammatical way. Two rich dudes have declared their intent to bring a professional foopball team to town, which is fine and even newsworthy* -- but hardly raises the question of whether a franchise has been "scored." The headline's job is to tell me what happened, not what someone speculates might happen.

Regardless of the downtown back-scratching, that's not the kind of question the hed raises. You can form questions by sticking a question mark on the end of a statement, but that creates a distinctive form called an "echo question" that you might remember from "Apocalypse Now":

Lance: Hey, you know that last tab of acid I was saving? I dropped it.
Chef: You dropped acid? Far out!

That's a question, but it's very much not the same question as "Did you drop acid?" If you agree, avoid getting them mixed up in headlines ever again.

That's a "grammar" thing. "It's official" is just a cliche. You may remove it from any lede, or any subsequent graf, with no effect on the meaning. And that means you may never try to improve on a story by putting "it's official" in a hed. There are no exceptions -- no matter how important you think the story is, no matter how few times in your life you've seem "it's official." Just never.

What will hubbing do to the Great Cliches? I don't know, but if someone wants to stake that out as a research agenda, I'd really like to see the results. We've known for a while (I hope) that there's only so much mileage in being local. If the outsourced desk in Bangalore looks at a map while editing and you don't, they're going to catch a mistake you might miss. Will a centralized desk enforce chainwide rules against cliches in headlines, even if that's the suggestion from the originating paper? Or will a plague of "Christmas came early" break out of containment and spread all the faster?

I'd like to know, but I'd actually just rather have a local copydesk to complain about.

* Although it skates awfully close to Elongated Yellow Fruit territory when the perps are "the Michigan-bred businessmen" and "the Michigan State graduates" in the first two grafs

Why bother with the question mark?

The only interesting thing -- aside from the process that produced "in orders to" -- about the Fox homepage here is why it took until midafternoon to, you know, get to the real point of the story. (You could make a case for studying how quickly it fell off, but that's -- squirrel! -- mostly owing to the chance to say "Sony," "FBI" and "North Korea" in the same clause.) Did it really take that long to find a critic to do the accusing, given that Dr. Manny is already on the payroll?

If you really want to catch the drooler media at their peak on the Cuba story, you might want to check out The Daily Caller:

President Barack Obama may visit Cuba, even though the government is repressive, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Wednesday.

“It is not unprecedented for us to go places and interact with countries with whom we have a very fundamental difference of opinion about how they treat their citizens,” Earnest said Dec. 17, citing Obama’s recent travel to China and Burma.
 
Whence the "fascist" in the headline? Hang on:

,,, A national socialist government has ruled Cuba since 1959. Cuba’s fascist regime was highlighted Dec. 17, when the country’s ruler — Raul Castro —- appeared in a military uniform and addressed his subjects as “compatriots.” In contrast, leaders of the Communist Party in Russia excluded military leaders and uniforms, and addressed their subjects as non-national “comrades.”

In 2011, Castro replaced his brother, Fidel Castro, who ruled the country since 1959.

Earnest defended the deal with the fascist government by saying it has released more than 50 political prisoners, promised to work with officials from the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cress, and promised to allow the importation of communications products, Earnest said.
 
In other words, if you got a cold, go take a shot of malaria. And don't forget the extra attribution!

No, but thanks for asking

Robert Bell shares his home with decorative skulls and skeletons and, he says, real ghosts.

The ghosts have inhabited the western Henrico County rancher for years, Bell said. He even suggested that visitors on a recent night might see one.

Yes, I'm sure he did.

... A self-styled “paranormal investigator,” Bell said he has checked hundreds of homes, buildings and battlefields. He sometimes charges travel expenses, but overall the work is not profitable, he said. He does it for the enjoyment.

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No, but thanks for askin'

A simple rule is hereby proposed for stylebooks everywhere:

When in doubt, use the grownup spelling.

I'm certainly not suggesting there's no g-droppin' in hockey. (Just heard a nice fat one midway through the second period here). If you wanted to bet that it's unusually frequent among hockey announcers, though, I might suggest that's not only a dumb bet but a pretty boring one. If that's the most interesting thing you hear, you need a lot more Don Cherry in your life.

This isn't even a pickin'-and-grinnin' g-drop -- the sort presentation editors use as a way of showing they respect your people's quaint habits and didn't really just ride in on a turnip truck from New Jersey. Rather than a dumb excuse, it has no excuse at all. (OK, maybe one -- another capital letter actually won't fit in the reefer. So shave the picture or shrink the hed a couple points.)

 As for the stupid question, let's not be too quick to assume a winged victory would be an "upset." Datsyuk just made it 1-0.

Dawn of the Stupid Questions

You do have to wonder what The Daily Herald thought would be a likely answer:

Yes!
No!
Compared to what?

The story, at least judging from the deck, has nothing to do with whether guns and pot "mix." It's about whether a medical marijuana law will require potential patients to "voluntarily surrender" their CCW permits and remind caregivers that they shouldn't have guns, subject to, you know, something.

Please. Given the choice between telling me something and asking me something, err on the side of providing information.

No, but thanks for asking

What is it about the Stupidity Tax that brings out the Stupid Question at America's copy desks? No, don't answer that.

It is kind of a reminder, though, that if you want people to trust your polling data come election season, two good starting points would be:

1) Never invent stuff about public opinion
2) Leave the "you may already be a winner!!!" to the hucksters themselves

Any questions? No, don't answer that either.

Dawn of the Stupid Question

The trouble with question heds is that they have so many answers:

1) Dunno. Since you're the one with reporters and news services and I'm the one with quarters to put in the rack, why don't you tell me?
2) In realist terms? Any of a number of people or organizations who think they can change attitudes or behaviors by randomly killing noncombatants in a highly public way. Or, you know, someone who's just nuts. In a world where punditry was an honest trade, an accurate answer might be: It's either somebody we've heard of or somebody we haven't.
3) What "this" did you have in mind -- standing around holding candles in the air? Because if you don't want the animal brain to think something, don't use a nice big colorful image to cue the animal eyes to set it in motion.

Given all those choices, maybe it would be a good idea to spend that frontpage space on talking about what you know, rather than on showing that you're just as baffled as your audience. 

Over here are the levees

"Passes over." What a kidder, that Fair 'n' Balanced Network!

But seriously, folks: how would you write the day's outrage story* if the assignment fell your way?

Google’s decision to mark Easter Sunday with a doodle of leftist icon Cesar Chavez atop its search engine angered some users in what they see as a snub of Jesus on the day Christians mark his resurrection.

Well, just a few points:
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Run awaaaaaaay!!!!

All right, sports fans, who's ready to help The State out with The Answer to The Question posed by The Centerpiece here?

The choices that will better define who we are – and who we want to be ...
Read more »

No, but thanks for asking

Just a couple of general observations:

1) Don't write question heds
2) Particularly when the whole point of the story you're referring to is "no"
3) Which is the only reason to run a Bigfoot story in the first place, isn't it?

Fast away the old year passes, and -- if you're the resolving sort -- banning question heds and Bigfoot stories would be the sort of resolutions that would not only let you sleep easier (and awaken with clear eyes and conscience) but make journalism a happier place to be in general. But we have other things we can be thinking about as well.

Our friends to the frozen north go the wrong way, I think, in their annual word ban. I'd love a world in which journalists simply didn't use terms like "job creators" outside of direct quotes and parody, but the time for that resulution would have been -- oh, late May or so. I'm fine with banning "kick the can down the road," but without a parallel ban on "throw under the bus," it doesn't seem to solve the sort of problems that need solving. Let's start the new year with a simpler rule: If it's what everyone is saying, don't say it.

Learn now the lore of clueless features

Today's hed tip: When you feel compelled to write a deck that knocks down the question in your question hed, that should be a sign unto you that the story beneath it is losing air rapidly:

One of the biggest holiday films this year, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, is based on British writer J.R.R. Tolkien's 1937 fantasy novel. But it turns into a mystery when Kentucky is linked to the worldwide literary classic. (1)

No, it doesn't -- at least, not much of one.

"There has been a lot of speculation that Kentucky had something to do with inspiring Middle-earth, the setting of the book, and the hobbits and their practices," said Devin Brown, an English professor at Asbury University.

That's as may be (though how much speculation counts as "a lot" is a different matter). There's plenty of speculation about plenty of things out there. What you do with that speculation before you put it in the front page actually tells your readers a lot about how you treat speculation -- and readers -- in general. Let's have a look:

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Made-up stories and Stupid Questions

You can see why this story found its way to the WashTimes's front page: a little pop culture, a little random fear of the swarthy hordes, and a chance to say TERRORISM! But the rule for question heds also holds for ledes:

Could the release of “Zero Dark Thirty” provoke violent protests against the U.S. in response to the film’s searing depictions of “enhanced interrogation” — the coercive, super-secret and bitterly debated methods used by the CIA against al Qaeda terrorism suspects?

If the answer is "no," you probably shouldn't ask the question. Onward:
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How not to introduce a paywall

Just thinking out loud here, but -- do you suppose, if it's the day you unveil the paywall that's supposed to keep the unwashed at bay, you might want to make extra-sure the content that reaches the homepage is worth paying for? Rather than, for example:

... Professional astrologer, Steve Nelson,* author of “The New World Cycle of Celebrations,” says that no traditional Mayan prophecies or present day Mayan elders predict calamity for the end of this calendar cycle.

Instead, what he says is predicted is a global shift in awareness, a transformation of consciousness such that the world may actually end as we know it on the psychic level.

Do tell!

Nelson, 65, who refers to himself as a cycles counselor, says that several cultural and mystical traditions converge in this time all portending the beginning of a new age. However, we must work to clear through the darkness that precedes this anticipated new era.
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Every fall, the trees are filled with underwear

Our friends downtown are asking the wrong person. I don't even know who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong.

March of the Stupid Questions

Dear friends at the Daily Herald: If you want to demonstrate the paper's value, shouldn't you use the space above the fold to tell the audience more things than you ask the audience?

As a reminder: The question mark is not a form of attribution. If a story isn't well enough sourced to support a headline that tells me something, you should be asking questions of the story -- not of the audience.