Today in making stuff up

For you fans of how the public understanding of natural disasters is created, here's the upper-left ear from the Drudge Report (still leading with Friday's Los Angeles earthquake as of this writing*). It's standard Drudge, meaning "links allegedly related to the top story, with ellipses," and we're especially interested in the third and fifth ones, which (ahem) appear to link to the (kaff) same story.

The first of those is true-ish, in that it pretty closely resembles something that a not-quite-accurately identified person said:

Jones said Friday’s quake was 10 times larger than the March 17 magnitude-4.4 quake near Encino. She added that every quake has a chance of leading to something bigger.

“Every earthquake has a 5 percent chance of being followed by something larger. The fact that this had a foreshock doesn’t particularly increase that probability,” she said.
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Limping, barreling, hammering

Actually, no. Not Thursday, when this one appeared, and not in the month-old bedtime story from Climate Depot that purports to back up the hed:

TAMPA, FL — Speaking to supporters in Tampa, Hillary Clinton says climate change is “wreaking havoc on communities across America.” Clinton warns that Hurricane Hermine “is not the last one that’s going to hit Florida given what’s happening in the climate.” She says, “When it comes to protecting our country against natural disasters and the threat of climate change, once again, Donald Trump is totally unfit and unqualified”.

Drudge, of course, was just getting warmed up for Friday morning:

The real fun -- and please don't think we're minimizing the risk posed by a very dangerous tropical cyclone* -- is in the stories linked from the ear:

Taking us to such tales as (yes, rly):

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Today in vizcomm theory

Well, we could say several things about the top story Tuesday morning over to the Drudge Report. For one, it's bogus. The drawback to writing the headline before the election is held is that -- pesky voters! What were they thinking* when they (hem) "resoundingly rejected" (kaff) the measure in question?
More interesting, I think, is the ear in the upper left corner, which in typical Drudge fashion says "Revolt ..." But that's not nearly as cool as the American flag waving against the cerulean sky, reminding us all the the Founding Fathers fought and died so we could abolish the hated property tax and fund all those pesky teachers and cops and things from some other source the legislature finds appropriate.

Your Editor is partial to the era of the 1A editorial cartoon, so of course he's interested in such modern-day incarnations as the random use of the flag to illustrate DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN-style blunders. More to the point, though, he sort of hopes the New York Times and the few other remaining serious papers will try to get through the campaign season without consulting the Drudge Report before filing their campaign stories.

There's a fundamental difference between grownup journalism, which has a tendency to screw up in the course of trying to get things right, and the likes of Drudge, Breitbart, and the Murdoch empire, whose native purpose is to lie and mislead. Please let your favorite professional news organization know that you appreciate the difference. 


* Maybe they were thinking about this sentence from the AP report: "The measure required the North Dakota Legislature to replace the money lost from eliminating property taxes." That'll put you right off your fresh-fried lobster.

Uh, not exactly. Not at all, actually

As the Reuters tale to which you're directed from the Drudge Report makes clear: No, not really. Not at all.

A mass evacuation saved thousands of people from India's fiercest cyclone in 14 years, but aid workers warned a million would need help after their homes and livelihoods were destroyed.

Some tropical cyclones "fizzle": Karen*, for example. This one, though, hit the Indian coast as more or less what we'd call a Category 3 hurricane, disrupting and destroying a lot of stuff but killing comparatively few people, in light of what storms of that scale can do. As someone who keeps up with how communication works in disasters (and as a human being in my spare time), I think that's a pretty reasonable outcome.

So: Is Drudge just too stupid to understand the distinction here, or is he making stuff up for some other reason? Much as I hate to bet against stupid when humankind is involved, I expect it's the latter. There's a reason for that.
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They said did!

The trouble with inventing your own grammar is that sometimes it doesn't work -- you plow blithely ahead with your favorite new construction, but your poor readers simply assume that stuff means what it did the previous day. In that sequence, you lose.

We've commented before on Drudge's recent habit of dropping subject pronouns (mostly in  complementized and subordinated clauses), generally because the result just looks weird -- like encountering Timespeak or Tribune spelling for the first time. This one, on the other hand, points directly to a wrong meaning. If your first reading was that there's a kidnapped border agent and some cartel has claimed him or her, good for you. Alas for Drudge, the story intends something different:
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Pronouns: The farewell tour

Shed a tear in passing for the specious pronoun count as an index of thinly veiled right-wing racism presidential narcissism. We may never see its like again -- though with a few hours left in the regular season, you don't want to rule anything out.

The pronoun meme deserves a spot in the Fake News Hall of Fame for its sheer persistence. (The flying verb in Drudge's play from last Wednesday  makes clear that this isn't a story that needs a lot of explanation.) It relies on three observations:
1) The Kenyan usurper uses first-person pronouns! Which most of us -- oops -- do pretty often.
2) The Kenyan usurper uses them N or NN or NNN times! Whether that's a proportion or a raw number, whether it's per minute or per word, or whether it's more or less than any of his predecessors, doesn't signify. GAAAAAAH!
3) Therefore narcissism! Which, sort of like the perpetual bedwetting over the Kenyan threat to "fundamentally transform" America, always ends up leading back to someone like Reagan, who used first-person pronouns with a pretty human regularity and closed out his tenure by congratulating himself on fundamentally transforming a lot more than that:

And something else we learned: Once you begin a great movement, there's no telling where it will end. We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.

Imagine what Fox News might have thought. Wait, don't.

Anyway, there's an enduring archive of pronoun madness over at Language Log. That doesn't quite get all the details, such as what we learn from how the meme spreads. Drudge's Wednesday play is from the Daily Caller, which seems to have a new aura owing to Tucker Carlson's ascent at Fox but is otherwise its same old droolery self:

President Obama referred to himself 75 times in his farewell address Tuesday night, according to a review of his prepared remarks by The Daily Caller.
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Demons are summoned by the mention of their names

A: The distance you have to go into Drudge's top story before the Kenyan usurper's name is mentioned.

Q: What is "10 paragraphs," Alex?

... The former Cabinet member earned the endorsements of several Obama administration alums, including former Vice President Joe Biden and former Attorney General Eric Holder. 

Q: But surely there's some other reason for using the evil one's picture in an article about the DNC election!

A: The penultimate graf, and stop calling me Shirley:

... Ellison enjoyed the support of the party’s upstart liberals, who saw his candidacy as a way to snatch a victory from November’s presidential defeat. Perez, who was on Clinton’s short list for vice president, was backed most strongly by Democratic stalwarts in the Obama and Clinton camps.

This isn't just another Drudge headscratcher. Here's the top Fair 'n' Balanced story from midday Saturday:

And, should you have missed it, from Feb. 6:

Drudge again, with an iconic image beloved of The Fox Nation:

Here it is from 2013, if you're scoring along at home:

And the usual suspects (TWT, the Heritage Foundation and Fox):

In case the party faithful should be tempted to take it easy, this is their warning: The enemy never rests!

We could give the last word to Richard Hofstadter: "History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power." Or, to bring Conan the Barbarian forward to the age of visual framing: Demons are often summoned by the mention of their names, but images move you up in the search rankings a lot faster.

Well, not really. Not at all, actually

Let's skip all the stuff about context, framing and the social construction of reality and look at a chunk of nice, old-fashioned, entirely fabricated fake news. Given those conditions, we're less interested in the creation of meaning -- after all, there is no unframed condition of news -- than in how far toward the center an out-and-out lie can spread.

The Drudge Report, as usual, isn't the originator, but it's an important indicator, because outfits (say, the Times) that don't spend much time with the drooler media do look at Drudge. Here, the vaguely policy-oriented sites (Heat Street, Campus Reform, the Education Action Group), which often wipe most of the foam off before they go out in public, are on an equal footing with sites that dispense entirely with the bib, like InfoWars and -- have you guys met ZeroHedge yet?

In the month leading up to the election on November 8th, we repeatedly demonstrated how the mainstream media polls from the likes of ABC/Washington Post, CNN and Reuters repeatedly manipulated their poll samples to engineer their desired results, namely a large Hillary Clinton lead (see "New Podesta Email Exposes Playbook For Rigging Polls Through 'Oversamples'" and "ABC/Wapo Effectively Admit To Poll Tampering As Hillary's "Lead" Shrinks To 2-Points").

Sadly, no. As in no, you didn't "demonstrate" anything, and no, that's not how sampling works, unless you have access to cheap and reliable time travel, in which case -- for an operation touting "the news that moves the markets" -- you seem to be missing a major career opportunity. As even the morons of the "unskewed polls" movement acknowledged four years ago, a difference between party identification and voter intent is not evidence of playing around with the sample. If you know the former, you can go back in time and skew the latter. Do send a postcard.

The point, again, isn't whether another huckster is playing Duke-and-Dauphin with the rubes. It's how far up the beach any specific fiction is washed before someone picks it up. Not every made-up story leads the Drudge page; the one about the pizza parlor didn't make it, but the one about Podesta drinking the chicken blood did:

And, to reiterate, the intent doesn't have to be for every story to produce an armed attack on an innocent restaurant. All that has to happen is for the story to get close enough that someone has to spend time denying it.

This is going to be a tough habit to break for news organizations that still fear they might miss the next Hoovergate, but really -- if you can't ignore fake news, at least you can run a laugh track behind it. The polls weren't rigged, the employment data weren't cooked, and you should make sport of anyone who says otherwise.

Including the president-in waiting? Well, that would be an encouraging sign.

Wishful thinking

No surprise from the Drudge Report here. I mean, everybody knew that as soon as the program of bond-buying macroeconomic support (that'll be the "pump") was slowed, the hitherto rampaging stock market would go to hell, and we all know which Kenyan Keynesian socialist marauder to blame for that, don't we?

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Propaganda prize

Here's a strikingly skillful illustration of the propa- gandist's art that seems -- at this writing -- to have worked itself into real news coverage. Please, if you're thinking about running this tale in a grownup newspaper, stop.

At above right is Fox News's centerpiece* from late morning. It's a beautifully executed bank shot: Matt Drudge posts a picture with a rumor that it came from the Clinton camp, Fox posts a story with a note that it's "working to confirm" the story, and by this carom, the Obama campaign is reacting to Fox's report of Drudge's rumor. And this entertaining little sideswipe is on its way to being "news."

As you'll note, Fox (at right) refers to this in the cutline as the "Muslim dress" photo, though Fox's stories themselves only referred to the costume as "Somali" -- until Fox could let someone else say the M-word:

Expressing outrage, Obama’s campaign suggested the purpose of the photo release was to invoke reminders of persistent rumors that Obama is secretly Muslim, and by extension, anti-American.

Brill! Fox has been able to say "Obama's a Muslim" all day without ever having to -- you know, lie or anything. (I mean, the Fox coverage carefully points out that Obama has "repeatedly denied that he is Muslim").

Before long, when campaign flacks start calling teleconferences (and reporters forget that the obligation to cover an event does not entail an obligation to write about it), other news organizations start to pay attention too. The AP says the appearance of the photo "is causing a dustup in the presidential campaign over what constitutes a smear." Obama, the AP notes, "is a member of the United Church of Christ and says he is not now and has never been a Muslim." (As LBJ probably -- alas -- didn't say, why claim it when you can make the sumbitch deny it?)

And McClatchy pushes things ahead with this helpful bit of context:

The photo could be interpreted as suggestive of Muslim garb.

So, of course, can blue jeans and sport coats. If McClatchy thinks it has some readers who are so blindingly stupid as to have missed that implication, the least it can do is add an obvious and equally "objective" relative clause: "... which was exactly the intent of whoever fed it to Drudge."

Brief detour to Media Theory Land. Gatekeeping theory is called "gatekeeping" for a reason. When something isn't a story, you can actually close the gate and ignore it. We call that "news judgment." It's worth a try, you think?

* Who's "dis-dressing" whom in that photo is a different layer of context that I'll leave to our visual colleagues.

Of names and dog whistles

It's not even that original, you guys -- Drudge appears to have borrowed the "Micah X" theme from a weekend Sun cover. But it is another nice illustration of how to dog-whistle in a hed while keeping your feet just inside the chalk lines of news practice.

As noted last week, being a "headline name" means you're recognized for who you are (Trump eats babies) rather than where you live (Ferndale man eats babies) or go to school (Kansas sophomore eats babies). The perp in an especially heinous crime can move into that category pretty fast, though "McVeigh" is more likely to make the leap than "Johnson."

Given names follow an even tighter rule -- unless, of course, they sound like Muhammad. "Micah" is a little too ambiguous to make the cut, but what a lucky break for Drudge that the middle name was Xavier: hence, Micah X! (You know, like notorious Muslim bandleader X Cugat scary person Malcolm X.) "X" was so evocative that one of the downpage heds had to be tweaked as well:

Choosing X as a surname predates the 1960s; here's how the World's Greatest Newspaper described Elijah Muhammad and colleagues, arrested on sedition charges in a 1942 draft-evasion case (complete with Flying Verb subhed):

Assume Oriental Names

...Many of them have assumed oriental names and some of their followers use only "X" or "XX" as surnames.

The (ahem) Oriental influence is further explained:

Have Plenty Of Money
"We have only scratched the surface," said a federal official. "It seems certain that Japanese money has been going to these organizations. None of these people has any visible means of support. The 12 leaders we took into custody Sunday and Monday have lavish and expensive costumes and have plenty of money. Even their followers, some of whom are poorly dressed, seem to have some means."

In those days, kids, the deranged right didn't have Drudge to spread its light across the darkened plain, It had to rely on a secret network made up of the biggest papers in the country. 

Two Minutes Hate

Today's quiz: How many times do you figure the Marie Antoinette of America's School Lunchrooms is mentioned in the "Wonkblog" post that Drudge links to?

a) 0
b) 1
c) 2
d) Well, we did do the lips nose

Reminder to our friends at the Washington Post: Even in your blogs, when you say "more scientists" do something, you really ought to provide some -- you know, evidence. But the point, as usual, is something larger: What makes Michelle Obama work so well for Drudge as a stock illustration of the pro-nutrition sins of the Nanny State?

It's an amusing coincidence, one supposes, that even as the first lady is being used as a proxy for the cramming-health-down-your-throat bureaucracy, the usurper himself is taking heat for, in essence, telling a bunch of toddlers to man up:

At the White House’s annual Easter Egg Roll this weekend, a group of innocent children, there to ostensibly hang out with the President and dye colored eggs, were beset upon by a horde of White House bees.

Can I interrupt for a second? The point of an event called Easter Egg Roll* isn't to dye the eggs, and if it was, it's probably a good idea to dye the ones that aren't colored yet. But onward:

But though the children screamed in horror, their shrill voices piercing through the springtime air, President Bee-Rack OBeemer, reading aloud a copy of Where The Wild Things Are, seemed unfazed by them. “Bees are good,” he placidly said, telling them to hush. “You’re not supposed to be scared of bees when you’re a Wild Thing!”

"Bees are good" isn't quite the same thing as "we rode bicycles down the steps without helmets and ate raw hamburger meat and STILL won the Cold War," but you can see the same sort of general idea emerging: Lighten up and be a Wild Thing every now and then. No doubt some Fox commentator pointed out that he'd be sleeping on the couch if Moochelle found out.

You really do have to wonder what Drudge and Fox are going to come up with when they have to make do with scary white people again for their securitization needs.

* I have it on good authority that I was taken to one during Ike's second term, though apparently neither I nor anybody else in the family brought a reporter's notebook.

Eyes 1, Brain 0: Try, try again

Your first question about the story at the top of the Drudge Report on Monday morning might well be: And how many times is the feckless Kenyan mentioned in the 539-word story linked from the headline? ("PAPER: Passengers Allowed to Skip Customs at JFK Airport -- AGAIN!)

Regular readers have probably guessed that it's the key to the right of "9" on the standard keyboard. Here's the Daily News's lede:

Passengers arriving at Kennedy Airport on an international flight were allowed to exit the busy hub without going through Customs — for at least the second time in recent months, the Daily News has learned.

Must have been direct orders from Soros or Huma or Valerie, then.

Bumbling airline and security officials let travelers on American Airlines Flight 1223 from Cancun, Mexico, out of the airport on Monday morning without having their passports or bags checked, sources told The News.
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Drudge surrenders

I'm not quite sure what to make of Matt Drudge's decision to throw in the towel at this point (except for the likelihood that the Times will feel obliged to run a column about it pretty soon). What's the tipping point here: People in modest clothing dictated by their faith being subjected to patdown searches? The possible association of the religious with substate political violence? As terrorist victories go, this looks pretty small-scale compared with, say, convincing the media system and a large chunk of the civil power structure to let the executive branch get away with the destructive, tangential and almost certainly illegal invasion of Iraq. But perhaps that's just me.

It's been true for some time that if we wanted Israeli-level airline security, we could have it. I don't think we want it.* For some reason, I also don't think Drudge's goal here is to help people make rational interpretations about the relationship between risk and the level of intrusiveness they're willing to accept. Editors are free to accept his instructions at face value. Or they may laugh them out of the building.

* I don't know. Get a seat behind a Baptist tour group from North Carolina on a flight to Ben-Gurion sometime and tell me what you think.

Today in race-baiting

If you're bored by the latest in Drudgian frame-setting, you can always head downpage and see what the party has told Fox to say today about the whole race thing. Of some interest in today's incarnation of this now-familiar dog whistle is that neither "Mohammed" uses that spelling: the first is a Mohamed, the second a Muhammad. (Oh, and the question of how and whether the second was "recruited" by ISIS, but that gets into Drudge's wholesale abandonment of direct objects and is a matter for another day.)

Anyway, aside from its hilarious misunderstanding of what "neoliberal" already means, this column a few weeks ago from extraplanetary historian Victor Davis Hanson put the Angry  White Man perspective on the current campaign in a new light:

Clinton versus Trump is a war of NPR, CBS and The New York Times against the National Enquirer, conservative talk radio and the Drudge Report. Clinton supporters such as former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, onetime Bush officials Hank Paulson and Brent Scowcroft, and billionaire Meg Whitman certainly have nothing in common with Republican Trump supporters such as Mike Huckabee and Rush Limbaugh.

So it's sort of like the Battle of Five Armies, now with added BatBoy?

Your winnings, ma'am

Pity the poor misunderstood poll. It's somehow become all the rage to claim that any piece of quantitative research whose results you happen to dislike is flawed by dishonest -- specifically, partisan -- methodology.  Now comes yet another attack on the craft of survey research, worth noting not because of its substance but because of the pay-no-attention-to-that-man-behind-the-curtain hilarity of its complaints.

Here's Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin,* who's shocked! shocked! to find that a polling agency is, you know ... asking questions about public opinion:

Exclusive: PPP caught doing advocacy polling on race**
PPP, a Democratic polling outfit, has long been viewed by suspicion by not only conservatives but by independent, credible pollsters. Now there is all the more reason to discount its “polling” as shoddy partisanship.

There follows a pretty long paragraph recounting a phone call with a Wisconsin resident who was perturbed at a telephone survey that had asked whether he thought "conservative media want white people to think Barack Obama hates them." (I know, it has kind of a self-evident ring to it, but social science is all about testing the link between hunches and reality.) So the blogger called the agency and got it to confess:

I asked whether this wasn’t a classic advocacy poll designed to get a specific answer. He demurred, “Well, we were asking a series of questions about conservative media.” He said that this call followed the posting on Drudge of the 2007 video in which then-Sen. Barack Obama (D- Ill.) talks about Hurricane Katrina and denying aid to residents. He claimed that since conservative media were trying to make an issue of this (in fact most conservative outlets downplayed or ignored the issue), it was important to see whether that effort (to poison the thinking of white voters, I suppose) was “successful.”

For a writer whose remit includes an "exacting" look at "conservative policy-making and Republican campaigns, pundits and politicians," that's either astoundingly careless or -- um, you make the call.*** The earth-shattering release of the 2007 video on Oct. 2 was the lead story at foxnews.com that night and through the following morning (above right). The coverage at Glenn Beck's The Blaze site includes some screenshots of the Drudge Report ("Obama's Other Race Speech") and a fairly detailed account of the Hannity program with  Tucker Carlson, whose Daily Caller broke the "exclusive" story of the five-year-old speech. The Washington Times checked in as well. It's hard to imagine the sampling method that could have led to a conclusion that the right-wing media "downplayed or ignored" the issue. But onward!
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Now known as 'glamor'

Well! Good thing the Fair 'n' Balanced Network had a lead story for Tuesday afternoon, so the faithful wouldn't be distracted by any pesky stories about anyone's former campaign manager going on trial or anything:

Twitter’s campaign to foster healthier conversations on its platform with the aid of academics is itself facing an allegation of anti-Trump bias.

In previous tweets from their personal accounts, a number of the academics involved in the high-profile project have repeatedly slammed the Trump administration.

Sound familiar? Drudge foreshadowed it on Monday afternoon:

And you know that when "academics" are hired to "monitor" "hate speech," no good is going to come of it. Scare quotes and all, as it turns out, we've known that since 1942. The World's Greatest Newspaper is going to tell us all we need to know about Harold Lasswell, investigator of "glamor" (or, as you might recall from your first masscomm survey class, the guy who articulated the who-says-what-to-whom-through-what-channel formula for looking at media effects). At the Trib, of course, he's just another nutty perfesser:

The propaganda rating of America's newspapers, it was disclosed today, is being studied by Harold D. Lasswell, a former University of Chicago assistant professor who attained publicity a decade ago thru:

1. A scholarly investigation of the meaning of "it," a feminine quality now popularity* known as "glamor" and termed thruout history by various titles, all meaning what the boys like in the opposite sex.

2. A learned thesis on the meaning of the Bronx cheer -- an expression which also has historic qualities but which Dr. Lasswell now thinks has no place in newspaper columns.

A Formula of Questions.

Lasswell is director of war communications research for the library of congress and has produced a "weighted average" system intended to be used in measuring the volume of Nazi propaganda in American publications. The system was explained at a postoffice hearing by Dr. Lasswell himself.

The Post Office, you might recall, was a pretty big factor in the travails of the "vermin press"; this particular hearing was about banning The X-Ray from the mails, and a month earlier, Fr. Coughlin's Social Justice had been impounded at the Royal Oak post office** to see if it was still being seditious. See if you can figure out why the Trib (or Fox, or Drudge) might be so concerned about Lasswell's formula for analyzing a publication:

1. Does it follow the Nazi propaganda that the United States is economically corrupt?

2, Does it oppose the administration's foreign policy or conduct of the war?

3. Does it assail the President on moral or ethical grounds?

4. Does it disparage Great Britain or other allies?

5. Does it say that Washington is run by  Communists, plutocrats, Jews, or crooks?

I hope we can all agree at this remove that the Roosevelt administration overreacted to the threat of the vermin press (though at the same time, we can note that banning Alex Jones from Twitter in 2018 isn't the same as banning The X-Ray or Social Justice from the mail in 1942). And there's not a lot of point to having a free press if anyone isn't free to oppose any administration's foreign policy. It's still worth noting who screams loudest when one asks why some news outlets consistently paint their enemies as commies, crooks and people named Soros.

* (Sic), adjective fans. The War on Editing has been with us for a while. This is May 1942, so only a few weeks until an unfortunately accurate headline was part of a package that almost got the paper indicted.

** It's still there. The new parking deck across the street looks really nice, too.

Charge for the ... wait, what?

"Fake news" (the real thing, not the stuff about the pizza parlor*) works because of the kind of context that makes news in general work. Information has to become a story to become news. Making up the information is generally not that effective, and it's often easy to spot. Making up the context -- making a story mean something that slips past the sometimes drowsy guards of the poor human brain -- is the better way to do real damage. So while you're restocking the survival bunker with ammunition and freeze-dried food at the thought of World War III, let's enjoy the miracle of a well-honed Drudge fake.

Start with the image, which is certainly real (here's what it looked like at the RealClear site in 2013). It started the morning at Drudge doing something else (right): reminding us that the Kenyan and his mooching family** are planning to fritter away some more of your tax money on food and scary music. Soon, thanks to Mr. Murdoch's bestselling London tabloid, the photo took on its new meaning. Take it away, The Sun:

PRESIDENT Obama has deployed US special forces troops along Lithuania’s border with “aggressive” Russia.

Tensions between Washington and the Kremlin have reached Cold War levels amid reports Vladimir Putin is deploying nuke-ready missiles in the Russian province of Kaliningrad – which borders Poland, Belarus and Lithuania.

Geographically challenged, but otherwise not untrue so far.*** Spotted the fakery yet?

And Lithuanian Defence Ministry spokeswoman Asta Galdikaite confirmed America has offered additional military support following Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

... She added: “US Special Operations Forces presence in Lithuania is one of the deterrents” against military threats by Putin’s aggressive regime, reports the Express.

US military chief General Raymond T Thomas told the New York Times that America has a “persistent” presence in the Baltic states bordering Russia.

... The US and its Nato allies will send battalions of up to 1,200 to each of the three Baltic states – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – and Poland by spring this year, reports the New York Times.

If "persistent" set your bullshit buzzer off, here's a detail from the Times's Sunday story:
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Today in GAAAAAAAH!

The baby names are back! It kind of pains me to acknowledge that I've been writing about the damn baby names since before the dissertation was finished, but at this point, it'd be ungrateful to deny the value of deranged racist paranoia to the overall scholarly project. And this time, Drudge seems to be committing a couple of basic violations of the way news works. 

First, for you junior-league players, is the axiom that heds are drawn from the lede: If the reporter made something a priority, the hed writer either follows in train or -- should the reporter have somehow* missed the point -- fixes the lede so it reflects the real news. Thus, if you link to the Mirror, which kicks off with Posh and Becks:

Celebrities continue to be a source of inspiration for new parents choosing names for their children.

Coleen and Wayne Rooney's name choices have been extremely popular this year, with twice as many babies called Kit and Klay compared to last year.

But Olivia is officially the most popular name for girls and Oliver the most popular for boys.

... your job is to capture at least some of the Roonsian magic.

More importantly, though, your hed needs to reflect the news itself.  In that Muhammad has been sneaking up on Jack (or Oliver) for years on end, your hed really ought to tell the audience how today is different from yesterday. "Muhammad in second" might have been a big deal when he was closing in, but -- unless the tables are fabricated -- the real story here seems to be that Muhammad has been knocked out of the top spot.

You'd think that might be cause for dancing in the street for Drudge and his ilk. Perhaps he's still trying to figure out how to give credit to his tangerine master.

* Shock horror outrage