Adverbs gone wild II: Executing the survivors

Here's one of those interchangeable-time things I was hoping for an example of:

Man dies after being struck by car
An 18-year-old-man* was killed in southwest Detroit on Saturday night after he was deliberately struck by a car on Michigan Avenue following an argument.

Glitch much? It makes perfect sense to say he died after being hit by the car, but dying after an accident and being killed after an accident aren't quite the same thing. Hence the classic rescue-'em-and-shoot-'em hed from a few years back:

23 killed after turboprop crashes near Caspian Sea

The operating principle seems to be that time adverbs have a conjunctive sense -- A has something to do with B -- that overrides their time sense, partly driven by the widespread journalistic fear of saying something the same way twice. Here are a few more examples from recent days, both with an after/when swap from hed to lede:

Police: Woman killed after her car hits another, then overturns
Police said a North Carolina woman was killed Monday morning when her car sideswiped a vehicle, then hit another car, causing a chain reaction before overturning on First Colonial Road. (Virginian-Pilot, 4/28)

Uniontown man killed after motorcycle crash in Saltlick
A 74-year-old Uniontown man was killed Saturday afternoon when his motorcycle collided with a pick-up in Saltlick, state police at Uniontown reported. (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 4/27)

Why not use "dies" for "(is) killed" in the heds? We don't even have the Elongated Yellow Fruit Syndrome to blame.

I don't think this particular bit of confusion is a long-term threat to democracy or free speech, and it probably isn't even too confusing for too awfully long. Still, it's a really strange habit to be so persistent in a trade that prides itself on its Guardianship of The Language. Makes you wonder whether we're wasting our effort holding the which/that line, doesn't it?

* Don't mind the hypenation; it's more or less random at the Freep these days.

Adverbs gone wild: A slight return

They're still lining up the survivors of traffic accidents and executing 'em down in Charlotte:

Man killed after he rear-ends CATS bus
A 38-year-old man was killed Monday when he drove his SUV into the rear of a Charlotte Area Transit System bus in south Charlotte.

Two killed after Saturday wreck in Conover
Two people were killed this weekend in Catawba County when the car they were riding in was struck by another vehicle.

Teen, grandmother killed after car hits golf cart
A 59-year-old Hudson resident and her teen granddaughter were killed this weekend when the golf cart they were in was struck by a car.

Once a philosopher, twice a pervert -- three times must mean it's "style." The ongoing confusion of "when" and "after" is so consistent that it really does look like a matter of policy. Any reason all heds of this sort can't say "die(s) after," rather than "killed after"?

Annals of 'after'

The in/after swap (here, the "killed after/dies after" version) won't be a surprise to you Usual Suspects:

NC man killed after barge hits boat
Authorities say a 55-year-old man died after a barge struck his boat on Watts Bar Lake in East Tennessee.

But here's a new case of random "after" from Fox:
Search halted after ship's crewman lost off Alaska

Well, Amazon pirates are ruthless, aren't they? Lost a crewman? Stop looking for him and start polishing up the brasswork! In real life, it's just another of those missing middle terms: Crew member goes overboard, Coast Guard searches for a day, Coast Guard suspends search. Correctly captured in the inside hed, "Coast Guard suspends search for ship's crewman lost off Alaska coast," but if you stop at the front page, you can be forgiven for deciding that the life of the sea is not for you.

Shooting the wounded

Gather 'round for another installment of Journalism Blunders that Won't Go Away. This week: the Post-Accident Execution.

Many of the Blunders that Won't Go Away are actual errors of "grammar," meaning misapplications of the wiring diagrams that make words go into sentences and sentences into meanings. If you can't pick the prepositions out of a phrasal verb accurately, you get the Cop-Shop Magic Wand ("turned himself into police"). And if you misread the chart that comes with a preposition, you get the Post-Accident Execution ("20 killed after plane crash"). Two examples from the past few days:

2 wounded by police after shots exchanged
Two men were taken to a hospital early Sunday after being shot by police near a nightclub on Independence Boulevard, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police said.

Hmm. That'd be "after" as in "behind in time, later than." So the lede is correct: They were taken to the hospital after they were shot. But the hed's wrong. They were wounded during ("at some point in the entire time of, in the course of") the exchange of shots. As it is, we're accusing the police of shooting 'em while they're down. And when your lede story is about the killing of two officers in a separate shooting, that's a pretty tasteless thing to imply. (See *note below, and while we're at it, avoid ill-formed jargon like "As is routine in officer-involved shootings." Officers don't involve shootings; shootings involve officers. Nothing wrong with "shootings in which officers are involved," unless we want to restrict it to "cases in which officers fire their weapons").

Want another one? Oh, all right:
Pedestrian dies after being hit twice
A 39-year-old pedestrian was killed early Friday after she was struck by two vehicles, according to the Missouri State Highway Patrol.

The hed's plausible but uncertain; if we don't know when in the sequence she died, we shouldn't specify it. But the lede is the real problem. Again, we have a killer operating independently from the event that actually did the killing. Why not stick to what you know: "struck by two vehicles and fatally injured" or "pronounced dead after being hit by two vehicles"?

Points off for ignoring style on highway numbers and titles. Credit the writer, though, for not using "police responded" -- and for not putting an irrelevant gender mark in the lede, as the fishwrap across town did:

A female pedestrian was killed early this morning on Highway 763 just north of Columbia after being struck by a minivan and dragged underneath a second vehicle.

Another post-accident execution! And every bit as easy to avoid as the others.

* On a mildly related parting note, a candidate has arrived for Clueless Lede of the Year. Gaze on this, from a column about the killings of the two officers mentioned above:

Charlotte isn't Mayberry. Perhaps it never was.

Wow. No kidding?

The strange syntax of news

We've talked about this before, right? The unholy collision of attribution -- which we like, because it helps keep us from being sued,  amen -- with time prepositions, in such a way that the attribution gets in the way of the action? Like these?

A would-be carjacker is dead after police said he was shot and killed by the person whose car he was trying to take on Detroit's west side.

A Canton man is facing charges after police said he fired two rounds from a high-powered rifle into a fireplace in his home in the 2300 block of Amber Street on Monday, prompting his two roommates to flee.

Two Detroit youths — one a student at Ferndale’s alternative high school for troubled youths — face preliminary exams Thursday after police said school officials followed them from campus to see them break into a home and steal two large televisions.

Daniel Ray Aderhold was arraigned this afternoon in 19th District Court on the charge after police said he allegedly* fatally attacked Perry Lee Beaubien by beating him in the head after the two had an argument.

None of these things happened "after" the cops said something, strictly put. They happened after someone did something criminal, and "police said" is there because ... attribution! We're not reporting something we witnessed; we're reporting what we were told. Conveniently, if we note that "police said" it, we're also wrapping ourselves in the blanket of privilege, which allows us to repeat a defamatory statement with impunity, owing to the circumstances in which it was made. "Smith hit Jones upside the head with a 2x4, police said" is protected in a way that "Smith hit Jones, a perpetually irritated neighbor tells EyeWitlessNews."

So "after" and "police said" don't have the same sort of syntactic relationship that preposition and clause do in "after the ball was over" or "after you've gone." "After police said" is a craft routine. It's short for "something happened after something else in more or less the order we're telling you, but for safety's sake, we're going to stick the attribution** in the middle." It's pretty harmless when you get used to it, but every now and then you get one that's actually ambiguous:

A Melvindale teen said she consumed Four Loko*** before she said she was sexu­ally assaulted last month.

"She said" is there for a good reason. We weren't there, and we don't know what happened, so we're going to signal our uncertainty. But grammar has us in a bit of a trap here. "Before" could reasonably go with "said," suggesting that the accuser was drunk when she made the assertion, or with the sexual assault.

This would have been a nice chance for an editor to step in and untangle the robotic writing. We're asking a lot when we expect readers to infer all the coded signals we send.

* Sigh. As a rule, the cops don't say someone "allegedly" did it; they say he did it, leaving it to the reporters to throw in "allegedly" in the vain hope that it might guard them from a lawsuit or make them look old and wise.
** Why don't writers simply set the attribution off with commas? ("Smith was arrested after, police said, she emptied a magazine into her former employer's trailer"). Too much work, and it isn't the way we've always done it, so there.
*** It'd be more complete to note that the accuser testified that she had been mixing it first with rum and later with cognac, but that doesn't go as well with the narrative of this story.

Anybody else have an ethics issue with this?

I'm interested in y'all's thoughts on whether this particular trend has gotten way out of hand. I'm reluctant to rag on the particular scribe (whom I don't know) too hard, since the host newspaper has a long track record of looking the other way when Some Writers put their name on other people's work, but I wonder if it isn't time to start cracking down on this pernicious habit:

ABC anchorman injured in ambush
By NAMEBRAND WRITER
TV/Radio Writer
Only a month after ascending to one of the top positions in journalism, ABC News co-anchor Bob Woodruff was seriously wounded Sunday in a fierce ambush near Baghdad.

Woodruff, 44, and cameraman Doug Vogt, 46, also wounded, had just boarded an Iraqi armored personnel carrier to get footage of convoy duty when a bomb buried in the roadside detonated as they rolled by. They were standing partially exposed out the back hatch making a video log of the trip when the attack occurred near Taji, about 30 miles north of Baghdad.
After the explosion, rebels opened fire on the convoy's eight vehicles -- mostly U.S. Army Humvees -- after the blast. At least one Iraqi officer was wounded in the attack.

Although Woodruff and Vogt were wearing helmets and armored vests, they were struck in the head by shrapnel. Woodruff was also hit in the extremities, ABC said Sunday.

Both were taken to a military hospital in Balad and then were flown overnight by the Air Force to the U.S. military complex in Landstuhl, Germany.

Woodruff is the best-known journalist wounded or killed in Iraq.

"World News Tonight" has a national audience of nearly 9 million and is the top-rated network news show in Charlotte, viewed in about 10 percent of the region's households.

Notice the level of detail: The scale of the fighting ("fierce ambush"), what they'd done ("just boarded an Iraqi armored personnel carrier to get footage of convoy duty"), what they were doing ("standing partially exposed out the back hatch making a video log of the trip"), what was in the convoy ("mostly U.S. Army Humvees"), what they were wearing ("helmets and armored vests") and where they were hit. Pretty impressive for somebody writing from, well, eight time zones away. All the more so when no agencies that might have been on the scene get any credit.

We're not getting much value added in the writing, after all: "After the explosion, rebels opened fire ... after the blast," and at least one Iraqi officer was wounded "in the attack." Sounds like standard breathless on-scene, on-deadline cop-shop babble. Except, again, the writer wasn't there. So what are we getting?

The only real "value added" is at the end: "Woodruff is the best-known journalist wounded or killed in Iraq." But again, when a writer states a superlative or absolute, the burden's on the writer to provide a list of the runners-up and a summary of the scoring system. On the one hand, we want the writer to tell us exactly what "best-known" means, so we can have a meaningful comparison with, say, Michael Kelly or any of the other prominent American journalists killed or wounded in Iraq. On the other, we could ask whether "best-known" means "best-known among other middle-class ethnocentric American white guys." Or do we actually have some way of measuring the well-knownness of the various European and Arab journalistic casualties of this war?

As a reader, I'd rather know that the stuff I'm reading is written by somebody with some sort of direct connection to the events described. For a rewrite, I'd like to know where the material came from. Putting NAMEBRAND WRITER's name on top of someone else's work doesn't do a lot for me. I'd rather the unnamed people who ran the risks and did the work got the credit, and I'd rather newspapers didn't presume they should lie to their readers by way of trying to build credibility and authority.

What do the rest of y'all think?

The missing middle

If you're fond of Fox (and you know you are), you've seen this fake news trick before. It's how "a longtime activist against Islam" arrested for violating a court order gets into the headlines as "arrested for filming outside child grooming outside trial": all you do is leave out the middle term in the news syllogism.

In the case at hand, as it turns out, there are half a dozen middle terms, assisted by a head fake from the particular journalistic use of "after" to mean "as a consequence of" or "in the course of" ("2 killed after truck hits car"). This is more or less the sequence, as Fox tells it:

• Suspect tries to fill water cup with soda
• Employee tells him he'll have to pay for that; suspect declines and leaves the restaurant
• Employee follows to remind suspect he isn't welcome back
• Suspect responds by trying to kick employee and heads for another restaurant
• Cops pursue him into bathroom of second restaurant, where he begins "to resist and fight with the officers"
• Enter the Taser

So, technically, yes. He was "Tasered after filling water cup with soda," but you probably don't need to look over your shoulder the next time you go for seconds -- any more than the jackbooted advance guards of sharia law will swoop down on you if you go to Britain and decide to film a random street scene with your phone. The latter is a more distinctively Foxian ideology, but the former is ideological as well, as long as you count tabloidism as an ideology.

And yes, "Coke Fiend" is in strikingly poor taste, but at least it holds out the possibility that someone at Fox thinks "Coke" is a generic term for soft drinks.

Calibrating the radar

This is the sort of thing the much-maligned "assembly line" model of doing journalism was supposed to correct or catch: a not-very-substantial story that isn't really sure what it's about, and thus bounces from one concept to another without addressing any of them. It isn't an out-and-out Faux News fabrication, but ... well, let's look at it for a bit before we talk about why we shouldn't do this sort of thing. Here's the lede:

Media attention and new campus alert systems established after the mass shootings at Virginia Tech may be responsible for a recent spike in false crime reports on college campuses nationwide.

Catch a bit of question-begging there? The lede's "about" the stuff in the main clause -- the media attention, the new campus alert systems, and what they allegedly may be responsible for -- but it can't be "about" a recent spike in false crime reports unless there is one. So there are actually two assertions that need supporting. How does the story handle them?

In the past two months, at least three false reports have been filed on crimes at North Carolina college campuses. About a half dozen more have been publicized across the country within the past six months.

The so-called editing radar is usually just a kind of rough deduction: Lede mentions a particular phenomenon, second graf offers a statistical representation of that phenomenon, therefore the stats must be some sort of support for the lede. Half a dozen of something in six months -- one a month, if you're scoring along at home -- must thus be some kind of "spike" in false reports of campus crimes. That's worth a little jaunt to library-land.

What's a "spike"? A sharp increase, originally one followed by an equally sharp decrease (the OED suggests it snuck into general use from the lab-coat sciences) but for the past couple decades also meaning just the increase. So one false report of campus crime a month must be a pretty sharp increase. Conveniently, the writer gives us a nice place to split groups for testing, the implied hypothesis being that there are significantly more false reports of campus crime after Virginia Tech (a year ago next week).

Preliminary examination of the data (lighten up; we're trying to sound scientific here) suggests that an out-and-out test would be a waste of time. People lie about crime on or near campus -- well, a lot:

A 19-year-old man from Rockville, Md., lied to University of Maryland at College Park Police when he told them he was robbed at gunpoint near Comcast Center last week, police said. (The Diamondback, October 2006)

An Ohio college student who admitted he faked his kidnapping will be arraigned today on the charge of filing a false police report. (May 2006)

A Florida Atlantic University student who reported she was sexually assaulted Feb. 26 in her car behind a campus library told authorities this week that it was a lie, university police said Tuesday. (Palm Beach Post, March 2006)

It's not new to North Carolina:
A 19-year-old UNCW student who reported she was attacked on campus last week has recanted her story, campus police said Tuesday. (Star-Snooze, August 2005)

... in part because it's not new anywhere:

Authorities say two Presbyterian College students lied about an attack to police because one of them was stressed out about school work. (AP, January 2008)

A former Claremont McKenna College visiting professor who led a campus protest against racism after painting slurs on her own car in March was sentenced Wednesday to one year in state prison. (Press-Enterprise, December 2004)

A ballpark search is always going to have reliability and validity issues; if you ask Lexis for stories in a particular database that include "campus" and "false police report," you don't get stories outside that database, and you don't get stories that say "false report to Smallville police." But we can safely pull the story out of the check-in line and subject it to (ahem) further scrutiny.

"For some people, it's the attention-seeking. For others, it's revenge. For still others, it's the feeling of power they get by watching a college campus react," said Daniel Kennedy, a professor in the Criminal Justice Department at the University of Detroit Mercy. "It's like starting a fire, then sitting back and watching the commotion."

No doubt he said it -- this is American journalism, after all, and we don't make quotes up -- but what's the context he said it in? Did we ask him why people in general turn in false cop reports (in which case, we're deceiving the readers, whom we've led to expect a story about why this alleged spike might be linked to Virginia Tech or the new trend in campus alert systems)? Or did we ask him why there's a spike in false reports of campus crime (in which case, we deceived him)? Or did we ask him if there is a spike in false reports of campus crime, and he patiently explained that there wasn't any reason to believe so, and we went back and forth for a while until he produced a quote that fit the story line? One certainly hopes not.

False reports that trigger campus alert systems may not cut into the budget, but they can be costly when it comes to credibility, Capt. Jon Barnwell of the N.C. State University Police Department said.

Interesting, and probably true, but the credibility of campuswide blast alerts isn't any of the story topics we've introduced so far, is it?

Three weeks after UNC-Chapel Hill student body president Eve Carson was killed, the Tar Heel campus was again on high alert. Senior Brian Sharpe reported a robbery attempt last week. Campus officials sent out e-mails to alert the campus community of possible danger.

The crime was never substantiated. Sharpe was charged with filing a false police report. A second e-mail blast debunking Sharpe's report was sent to students, staff and faculty.

Were these genuinely the same level of "high alert"? An overnight murder a good ways off campus*, and a real-time robbery attempt somewhere near campus (which is what the e-mail blasts are usually trying to address)?

Meagan Shallcross, a freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill, said it was disturbing to learn that the report was fake, especially coming just weeks after Carson's death. "It's always going to scare people, but I think it seems so disrespectful," she said.

Brain hurts at this point. The story's already bloated out of control. What does "it seems so disrespectful" have to do with any of the topics we're trying to cover? Or was the goal to get a quote of some sort, regardless of relevance, from some UNC student?

On Feb. 14, a gunman killed five people and wounded 16 others gathered in a Northern Illinois University lecture hall before taking his own life.

Several weeks later, on March 3, Matthew Haney told authorities at Appalachian State University in Boone that he had seen a gunman near the west end of campus. School officials sent out a campus alert and canceled evening classes.

Authorities later said he made the false accusations because he feared having to pay for damage done to the front door at his campus apartment.

True enough, but doesn't this sort of flatly contradict the premises of the lede? Desire for "media attention" is usually not a factor in what we will hypothesize here as "garden-variety undergraduate cluelessness." And the campus alert system might be the mechanism that spread the false report, but if it is -- a somethingori -- it can't be the cause of the false report.

Well, we could go on and on, as the story does, but things aren't going to change much. There's no evidence of any increase, much less a "spike," in false reports of campus crime (or any indication that anyone made the remotest effort to see if there was one). And of the local examples cited, none support the idea that a desire for media attention, or some sort of teething pains in campus cop technology, has anything to do with any such increase, in the unlikely event that it might have happened. Revenge and power? Out there in some abstract world, perhaps, but no reason to think they're related to anything we bother to address. In short, we have a story that actively subtracts from the sum of human knowledge. On average, you're dumber after reading it than you were when you started.

Which is to suggest, overall, that openly dishonest journalism a la Fox isn't the only kind of bad journalism out there. This isn't a malicious story; it's a potentially interesting story that turned into a bad one because it spends all its time reaffirming received wisdom, rather than asking a few basic questions about how the "conventional wisdom" managed to pass itself off as either conventional or wise.

* About a block from the original HEADSUP-L office; I don't want to hear any challenges about the geography.

And the scorpion said ...

... well, enough with the well-worn conventional wisdom of the Near East.* But it's a handy reminder of why heds need to avoid confusing the word with the deed, no matter how tight the count, and no matter how urgent the pressure to be perky:

Israel halts bombings
But Lebanon ground campaign continues
JERUSALEM - Israel agreed late Sunday to suspend its aerial bombardment of southern Lebanon for 48 hours after an attack on a house in the village of Qana killed at least 54 civilians, most of them children.

U.S. State Department officials announced the suspension after a tense day in which U.S. officials for the first time appeared unhappy over the turn of events in Lebanon.

Agreeing to do something, it should go without saying by now, is not the same thing as doing it (why a Washington writer covering a State Department story gets a Jerusalem dateline is another issue). The NYT stayed on safer ground by using the participial form:

Israel Suspending Lebanon Air Raids After Dozens Die
Israel agreed to suspend its airstrikes for 48 hours while it investigates an air raid on a Lebanese town that killed dozens, many of them children.

the traditional wisdom being that "is suspending" leaves you more wiggle room: It describes a process (declaration through deed) rather than an outcome (deed). It's not the revealed gospel, but it certainly looks more cautious in light of this from the Beeb's most recent update:

But less than a day after the agreement, Israeli planes bombed parts of southern Lebanon.

Suffice it to say that there's not much point in even starting the media bias debate -- being handled ineptly at many or most major news outlets, if you're in a shopping mood -- if we can't get the 1A heds in tune with events.

* The scorpion's punch line being "It's the Middle East." You can make it a Northern Ireland joke too, but i forget which sort of fauna you need to involve.

Assorted headline musings

23 killed after turboprop crashes near Caspian Sea
What'd they do, line the survivors up and shoot them? You could say "23 killed in crash," you could say "23 dead after turboprop crashes," you could say "Plane crashes; 23 dead" -- there's rather a lot you could say. But prepositions mean stuff. Don't fling them around at random.

Worship, fellowship, outreach grace holiday calendars
Amid the hundreds of services and sacred events gracing the calendar this weekend in the area, some Christmas highlights:
Grr. Copyeds, your job is to keep writers' religious biases out of stories -- not to amplify them in big type. No more "gracing the calendar."

’Tis the season for mall mayhem
Every time a "'Tis the season" hed appears, an angel is blindfolded and secretly flown to some country ending in -stan where "cruel and unusual punishment" is not a constitutional no-no but a varsity and club-level sport. Are we listening over there at Vox?

Battiest story of the (no longer young) year: Nominations open!

This next tale doesn't unlock the entire secret inner chamber of media cluelessness. But it does shed light on lots of the different things that can and do get out of tune between the first spark of an idea and the final product that lands in a puddle near your doorstep.

Some particularly amusing (and sharp) questions have been raised of late about how errors happen and when and how they get fixed (or not). One of the entertaining things about this one is that almost nothing in it is correctably "wrong." Generally a correction requires a story that says X, whereas 1/X or Y or some other not-X is actually the case: We said the mayor was indicted on three counts of second-degree bestiality, but the court record shows it was two counts of third-degree bestiality. Sorry!

Conceptual errors, meaningless constructs cooked up for the occasion, statistical fabrications, and blithe ignorance of context, on the other hand, don't generally get corrected because they aren't provably "wrong" in the X vs. not-X sense. Hence, corrections tend to look like this:

In a brief report, Cows moo with an accent etc, page 10, August 23, we quoted John Wells, professor of phonetics at the University of London, as saying, "This phenomena is well attested in birds." He assures us that what he said was the correct: "This phenomenon is well attested in birds."

Given the chance, Prof. Wells would probably rather have assured the Guardian (and Press Association and the Beeb) that however well the phenomenon is attested in birds, cows do not moo with a freaking accent. He puts it a bit more politely:

I told them that I thought it was highly unlikely, but that there had been serious research showing that various species of bird exhibit geographical variation in their calls. And if birds and human beings have local accents, you can’t entirely rule out that cows might too.

So the surface error is corrected -- yes, professor knows singular from plural -- but the underlying PR fabrication, which relies on ignoring the context of the bird-call comment, goes unchallenged.

Anyway, on to today's specimen. It started life as the No. 4 entry on the "news digest," AP's capsule description of the top current and upcoming stories, moving about 1:45p Friday for Saturday ayems. The AP sent half a dozen takes between about 4 and 10p Eastern time, but that's not what readers see. This is news in its natural setting: An edited version, and it looks like a pretty early one, from a major regional daily (it'll take a few days for Lexis-Nexis to get a handle on how many papers ran it, but that will be worth tracking too).

U.S. war deaths now equal 9-11 toll
2,973 dead in conflicts initiated as an answer to people killed here

WASHINGTON -- Now, the death toll is 9-11 times two.

U.S. military deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan now match those of the most devastating terrorist attack in America's history, the trigger for what came next.

See a couple of pretty massive assumptions building up here? One, that deaths in war vs. deaths in the event that precipitated war is a valid measure of something, and two, that these are somehow all the same war. That's not falsifiable, in the sense that opinions aren't falsifiable, but it's a pretty strong ideological marker for a news agency to be laying down. (Reminder to editors: A blunder might be the AP's (or McClatchy Washburo's) fault, but when you hit the "send" button and the plate is cut and the press rolls, you own it too.)

The latest milestone for a country at war comes without commemoration.

It also might come without knowing exactly who is the 2,973rd man or woman of arms to die in conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, or just when it happens. The terrorist attacks killed 2,973 victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Whoa. We know it's happened, but we don't know when it's going to happen? [Matters get worse a hair after 10p, when the 5th lede -- broadly, the fifth revision, or sixth version, of the story --notes that the milestone has been passed: It came without the precision of knowing who was the 2,974th to die in conflict. ... The Pentagon reported Friday the latest death from Iraq, an as-yet unidentified soldier killed a day earlier after his vehicle was hit by a roadside bombing in eastern Baghdad. It sounds, in short, as if we know exactly who and where, even if the name hasn't been released yet.]

This is not the first time that a war that was started to answer death has resulted in at least as much death for the country that was attacked first.

AP original: "Not for the first time, war that was started to answer death has resulted in at least as much death for the country that was first attacked, quite apart from the higher numbers of enemy and civilians killed." So the AP syntax has been de-purpled a little, but has any meaningful editing been done? Let's see.

Once your head stops spinning, unpack the construct a little. Since we're mentioning it, we obviously think it's a valid measure of something, but what exactly makes this variable important: War that's (1) "started to answer death" results in (2) "as much death" for (3) "the country that was attacked first"?

So the US civil war is right out (no Union KIA at Fort Sumter), since it wasn't started to "answer death"? How about that pesky World War I? It must have crossed the line with the first two Austro-Hungarian combat deaths (equaling Franz Ferd and his morganatic frau). Do any wars that meet condition 1 not also meet 2 and 3? Or are colorless green ideas asleep furiously at the switch again?

The body count from World War II was far higher for Allied troops than for the crushed Axis. Americans lost more military personnel in a succession of Pacific battles than the 2,390 people who died at Pearl Harbor -- the attack that made the U.S. declare war on Japan.
The U.S. lost 405,399 in the theaters of World War II.

First, somebody should remind the AP that World War II was well under way for some years before Pearl Harbor. And yes, the Allies had more combatant deaths than the Axis (and about twice as many troops mobilized). But our writer's playing apples and oranges. Take out Soviet KIAs -- Moscow wasn't a part of the US war with Japan, after all -- and the picture's quite different. Japan had about five times as many battle deaths as the United States (1.5 million to 292,000, per Dupuy and Dupuy; AP appears to be counting both battle and nonbattle deaths among troops) and three times as many as China. Germany had less than half the Soviet total ("proving" the point?) but more than three times the combined US-British-French total (guess not).

We've got a lot of numbers thrown solemnly about here, but not the faintest idea of what they mean or what points they do or don't support. That lends a certain poignancy to the graf (deleted here) that the AP uses to set up the following quote. "Now this," the AP intones. To which the reader is justified in replying: "Now what?"

"There's never a good war, but if the war's going well and the overall mission remains powerful, these numbers are not what people are focusing on," said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Boston University. "If this becomes the subject, then something's gone wrong."

He has a point, but -- as with Prof. Wells above -- it's worth wondering whether he and the AP are talking about the same thing. Are "these numbers" the ongoing cost in US lives or the spurious correlation between the civilian cost of a terrorist attack and the cost in military deaths of a related war and one whose stated purpose (depending on which way the wind was blowing) was rather, um, different?

Concluding sermon: Deaths in these wars are worth our notice (probably moreso than one would judge from their play in the press generally). Made-up statistics aren't. Surely there was some news somewhere from Iraq or Afghanistan that could have used this space to actually further public understanding.

Theory time: Walking around with no legs

Should we be talking about media theory while watching a great power shoot itself repeatedly in the foot (pausing once or twice to reload) while stumbling toward something that might resemble the geopolitical status quo ante bellum, only worser? Well, yeah. So here's a theoretical proposition to toss around while enjoying the morning roundup from Fox News:

Media effects are downstream from media sociology

This is not, of course, meant to start a round of theoretical "mine's bigger" or suggest that one bag of theories has to precede another in all cases. It is to say that when we see a change in public attitude or understanding about mediated events, the odds are that it follows some interesting (and probably measurable) change in media practice. To flip things around and be more specific, a change in whether, where and how often people hear "walking around with no legs" might affect perceptions of the person who says it.

Now, that doesn't mean a lack of attitude change means a lack of media change. Pretty much every news site I look at has adopted a form of the "live updates" Fox is doing in the top position Saturday morning -- basically, liveblogging while wearing a trench coat and a press badge -- and there's no reason to think such a change in presentation form is going to change your attitude about coups, earthquakes, Missing Moms or anything else it's applied to.

Nor do attitudes have to change for a media effect to be present. Should the "live news" feed contain a story every few days whose subject-verb-object motive power comes from "CentCom releases 
photo," it's doing its job if the median Fox viewer's attitude remains  stable at "exterminate the brutes." A counterframe could also try to preempt attitude change; if CentCom (through Fox) is reassuring you that Navy food is perfectly awesome no matter what your cousin saw in USA Today, there's a photo for that too.

But setting aside all the caution against false positives, the media-practice-to-media-effect chain does suggest that when Fox starts quoting Donald Trump verbatim, at length, we should start to keep a careful eye on the parts of the Trump coalition where all the much-touted fractures might be expected.

"At length" doesn't mean "'War and Peace' but with an intermission." If your question has been "what will it take for these people to notice that their cult worships a barking loony?", the answer might be just a couple of sentences -- if the gatekeeping practices at Fox allow those sentences through on the regular. Even if you're rolling your eyes by now at Trumpian chestnuts "they have no leaders, but their leaders are really friendly now" or "walking around with no legs," imagine what the Fox user seeing them, in quotes, for the first time might think:

President Donald Trump said Iran "can't blackmail us" after the country announced they were reimposing restrictions on the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday morning.

"We have very good conversations going on. It's working out very well," Trump said. "They got a little cute, as they have been doing for 47 years, and nobody ever took them on. We took them on. They have no Navy. They have no Air force. They have no leaders. They have no nothing. Actually, their leaders are ... it is regime change."

Despite Iran wanting to close the strait again, Trump said in the Oval Office that negotiations are "going actually along very well" and promised more information "by the end of the day." Trump also cited how oil tankers are now coming to U.S. ports to fuel up, including in Texas and Louisiana.

"We're taking a tough stand. They've killed a lot of people. A lot of our people have been killed. A lot of your fellow soldiers have been killed over the years by Iran," Trump said, citing how he ordered the strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran's elite Quds Force, in January 2020.

Trump described Soleimani as the "father of the roadside bomb."

"And when you see soldiers or others, but soldiers generally walking around with no legs, with no arms or face that's been smashed, that was Soleimani, it was Iran that did that," Trump said. "So we have a much different view on it than other presidents. They've gotten away with murder for 47 years. They're not getting away with it anymore."

And then imagine what it all might look like the next day, and every few days after that.

Important first-week-of-the-term caution here. If there's thing about media effects to have tattooed on your forehead, it's that one message does not change the world, whether it's Napalm Girl or an invasion from Mars. With that firmly in mind, I'm going to suggest that a testable hypothesis is within reach: regular exposure to verbatim Trump will lead to a decrease in support among Trump partisans. (I was taught that it's rude to hypothesize the null, but yes, this implies it would not lead to significant change among anti-Trump partisans.)

Opposing interpretations are welcome.

Today's in-depth journalism

You almost have to feel sorry for whoever was in charge of turning Massster's morning tantrum into a news story at Fox:

President Trump went on a wide-ranging Twitter rant Saturday morning, bashing Hillary Clinton, “fake news,” The New York Times and other favorite targets.

Trump tweeted at least eight times within a one-hour period, focusing first on a Washington Post story, based on unnamed sources, that alleged Attorney General Jeff Sessions talked to a Russian ambassador during the 2016 White House campaign about policy issues and other matters.

"A new INTELLIGENCE LEAK from the Amazon Washington Post, this time against A.G. Jeff Sessions. These illegal leaks, like Comey's, must stop!" Trump tweeted.

Points for getting "rant" into the lede, I suppose. But if you're waiting to hear what the "nuke commission" has to do with this, keep waiting. (One of the tweets about mid-rant or so does mention the commissioning of the Gerald R. Ford,* but the story mentions neither the ceremony itself nor the propulsion system.) The inside hed avoids that problem, but it still requires some cognitive problem-solving:

Only one of the Clintons is mentioned by name in the text, though if you're a regular Fox reader, "big dollar speeches" is your cue.

If you're wondering why it takes so long to get to the Times, check out the delicate bit of avoidance here:

... Trump also tweeted Saturday that The New York Times has a “sick agenda” regarding national security and that paper “foiled”  a U.S. strike on Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, believed dead for months.

“The Failing New York Times foiled U.S. attempt to kill the single most wanted terrorist, Al-Baghdadi. Their sick agenda over National Security,” Trump tweeted. However, to which attack the president was referring and why he singled out The Times was immediately unclear.

The daintily undangled preposition in "to which attack" is charming. It's been a while since "immediately unclear" came up; it still looks like a bizarre reading of the Strunkenwhite mandate to put things in positive form, but syntax is only half the fun. Other parts of the Fox empire have little trouble identifying the Times's sins:

In a wide-ranging interview moderated by Fox News' Catherine Herridge, Thomas, who leads the Special Operations Command, said his team was “particularly close” to Baghdadi after the 2015 raid that killed ISIS oil minister Abu Sayyaf. That raid also netted his wife, who provided a wealth of actionable information.

“That was a very good lead. Unfortunately, it was leaked in a prominent national newspaper about a week later and that lead went dead,” Thomas said. “The challenge we have [is] in terms of where and how our tactics and procedures are discussed openly. There's a great need to inform the American public about what we're up to. There's also great need to recognize things that will absolutely undercut our ability to do our job.”

Thomas appeared to be referring to a New York Times report in June 2015 that detailed how American intelligence agencies had “extracted valuable information.” 

”New insights yielded by the seized trove – four to seven terabytes of data, according to one official – include how the organization’s shadowy leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, operates and tries to avoid being tracked by coalition forces," the Times reported.

Would this be the same raid that Fox reported on in May 2015?

U.S. personnel overnight killed a key Islamic State leader in charge of the group's oil and gas operations in a raid in eastern Syria, the White House said Saturday.

A team of Delta Force commandos slipped across the border from Iraq under cover of darkness Saturday aboard Black Hawk helicopters and V-22 Osprey aircraft, according to a U.S. defense official knowledgeable about details of the raid.

... Ancient Assyrian texts and other priceless artifacts were recovered as well as what the defense official called a "treasure trove" of intelligence materials, such as cell phones, laptops and documents.

You'd think Gen. Thomas's assertions might have rung a bell with the interview's moderator, in that she's credited on Fox's follow-up two days later:

A special team of CIA, FBI and Pentagon interrogators has been dispatched to Iraq to grill the wife of the key ISIS leader killed in a daring commando raid last Saturday -- but sources told Fox News that the questioning, which will include queries about murdered American aid worker Kayla Mueller, will stop short of using rough techniques.

... Umm Sayyaf, the wife of Abu Sayyaf, was captured in the raid by the U.S. Army's elite Delta Force in eastern Syria and whisked away to an undisclosed Iraqi facility where the U.S. High Value Interrogation Group is questioning her.

... In addition to taking out a key ISIS leader and the man responsible for the terrorist army's black market oil trade and capturing his wife, the raid netted a "treasure trove" of sensitive information, according to Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas. Officials believe the terrorist leader's wife may know even more about ISIS' operations.

... Cellphones and laptops were seized in the operation and are now being analyzed for intelligence. U.S. officials said it was likely, given Abu Sayyaf's position, that he knew about more than just the financial side of the group's operations and also was targeted for his known association with the group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Sure. It's entirely possible that -- three weeks after the raid, and a week after the Times reported  on 'information harvested from the laptops, cellphones and other materials," al-Baghdadi suddenly realized that the laptops with the terabytes of data were the missing ones!!! Otherwise, it's hard to see why you'd give the competition top credit for following up on your own reporting. Maybe the smart reporter is the one who decided things were immediately unclear.

* Presumably, President Trump has gotten over his preference for steam catapults over "the digital." Fox doesn't mention that, either.

Design fail: Cheers!

This one needs a bit of back story. Along with their generous three days a week of home delivery, the local fishwraps provide an online facsimile of the print edition. You can browse through it page by page and click on articles, photos or ads to get a readable version. With stories, one click gets you to a text-only mode, and the second click yields a full-size view of the article and its illustration.

Except when the program outsmarts itself, as seems to have been the case here. The art is meant to illustrate a top-of-the-page blurb promoting today's beer festival at Eastern Market, but when you click on the news briefs, guess what comes up?

It's an ambiguous design at best anyway, even with the (annoying) color screens. The simple solution would be to move the art to the right of the text. If that breaks a house rule -- well, break it!

The writing in the banker story isn't getting any better:

A funeral was held Friday in Detroit for Mt. Clemens bank president and CEO David Widlak, days after his body was found floating in Lake St. Clair and after a private autopsy commissioned by his family showed he was shot execution-style in the back of the neck.

That's one too many "after" clauses for me. And the bizarre participial adjective "shot" makes its way into heds on consecutive pages -- in addition to the "shot bank CEO" here, we have "Shot parole absconder is turned in" on 4A.

I think the hed writers are inferring a rule on the order of "any past participle can become a preposed adjective with the meaning of 'that was' or 'who was.'" Alas, there ain't no such animal. Some participles do. "Buried treasure" is treasure that was buried, and we couldn't write crime heds if "slain" didn't mean (as the OED puts it) "that has been slain; killed; slaughtered." Others need some help. "Eaten" survives with "half-eaten" or "moth-eaten," but "the eaten pizza" doesn't work.*  Still others have specific and limited uses, like the "killed virus" in vaccines.

"Shot" has some of both: special uses like "shot herring" and "shot velvet," along with compounds like "shot-down" and "shot-up." But the only cite meaning "person who was hit by a shot" looks pretty literary. I'd rule it out for heds.

Why did it show up? I suppose, given the dueling autopsies and the slight shadow of a doubt in the newer one, the desk wanted to avoid "slain," and "dead" seems pretty redundant given that it's a funeral. "For banker found dead in lake" might work.

But first things first. Preview the page before you publish it, and if the result is embarrassing -- as this hed-and-art collision certainly is -- fix it. Sheez.

* Except for the Swinburne cite, that usage looks like it faded out early in Modern English.

One man's terrorist ...

Odd, it didn't take this story very long to fall right off the old issue-salience agenda at (ahem) some networks:

Authorities in Iowa have captured the suspected gunman in the ambush-style attacks early Wednesday morning that claimed the lives of two police officers who were sitting in their patrol cars.

Sounds like it's still a pretty big deal, right? And one that merits a particularly Fox-type headline?

 Let's see what light the sidebars might shed. There's one from Oct. 14:

Hours after five Dallas police officers were killed by sniper fire during a July protest over police aggression, a call reporting a break-in at an apartment came in to the Valdosta Police Department in Georgia.

... It was just one example in a growing number of police officer ambushes across the country in recent months.

... and another from Oct. 9:

If you want to see the face of violence, rage, and hopelessness in America today, take a good look inside our failing inner cities and the desperate people who are struggling to survive. Start with Chicago. 

... Public bashing of our police has become so politically convenient, we now have to listen to vapid Hollywood elites and pampered millionaire athletes offer their shallow commentary.  ...Our president does the nation no service when he announces how he can empathize with Kaepernick’s plight.

So you can see the disappointment at Fox when the suspect is white identified:
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This hed's forbidden. Here's why

Yes, it sounds all linky and clicky, but please -- three "here's why" and a "here's what"? Any objections to placing this one on the Forbidden Heds list?

And can it be a reminder of the old days? "Dies after being shot," not "killed after being shot," please. 

You provide the prose poems ...

What do you suppose was the top story for most of Friday at the Formerly Fair 'n' Balanced Network?

From siccing wild dogs on his own uncle to gunning down his enemies with artillery meant for taking out planes, North Korea's Kim Jong Un has built a reputation for dispatching with extreme prejudice all those who cross him.

While some of the terrifying methods of execution have never been confirmed, the mere mention of them is sure to keep his inner circle in line - and any potential rivals quiet, say experts. A confirmed favorite tactic, blowing people away with anti-aircraft guns, leave victims unrecognizable.

I'm not sure if the grammar is there to distract you from the admission that the story's bogus or the other way around. Anyway ...

"Because there are several guns bound together, it would be hard to find the body after firing it once," Hong Hyun-ik, chief researcher at the Sejong Institute, a security think tank based in Seoul, told local broadcaster YTN in 2015. "It's really gruesome."

In late February, South Korean officials revealed that five North Korean officials had been subjected to the particularly grisly form of overkill. Other methods trickle out of the secretive Hermit Kingdom, their unverified status only burnishing the legend of Kim's depravity.

A report that one official was killed by a mortar round has been treated with skepticism. But the tale sent a strong message when coupled with his alleged crime: drinking and carousing during the official mourning period following the death of Kim's father, the equally brutal Kim Jong Il.
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Rly? No, not rly

See, there's this tradition in journalism: When you write stuff in the lede, you're warranting that there will be detailed stuff in the body of the story that supports it.

That's how the whole "inverted pyramid" thing works. When you write, oh, "Four people were injured, two of them seriously, when two moronic texting drivers ran into each other this afternoon at Woodward and Warren," you're sketching the broad outline of the picture you'll fill in later. It's written to be end-cut if necessary. You can stop after the first graf, or any other step in the pyramid, and all you'll miss is a few details. So when you read:

The Obama administration’s effort Sunday to win support for a punitive military strike on Syria is facing opposition and criticism in part because of its handling of the fatal Benghazi terror attacks, which occurred one year ago Wednesday.

... you're not just entitled to assume that it's true, you should expect chunks of specific evidence to back up the general assertions. Shall we look? 
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Copydesk radar

It's hard to pin down a lot that's overtly evil about today's story, but it feels funny. So perhaps this is a good chance to talk about the mystery of copydesk radar and whether it works (or, for that matter, exists). Pls consider the floor open for discussion. I think everybody will agree that the qualitative/subjective side of editing is the hardest to explain or teach.

It's not always the side your colleagues want to hear about, either. If your editing radar suggests that something's amiss with a story, you'd best be able to talk in detail about why that blip represents a reporting blunder with foils locked in attack mode, rather than just another flock of ivory-billed woodpeckers doing the Hokey Pokey. Because if you ask the city desk which of those phenomena has produced the most recent confirmed sighting, the answer's going to be "woodpecker."

Some excerpts, then, and some attempts to quantify what it is about them that sets the radar off:

'Forgotten soldier' remembered at last
Home buyers discover memorabilia linked to WWII Army private

They call him the forgotten soldier, killed on an Italian battlefield 63 years ago.

Forgotten, that is, until Janice and David Bentley bought his sister's house in the Stanly County town of Norwood.

Two things at the outset. One, orphan pronouns make me nervous. Especially plural ones. I don't know if "they" means two people in Stanly County, the whole Third Infantry Division or some total in between. But it usually implies a big number or a collective understanding, as in "They call the wind Maria." Two is "until," for pretty much the same reason. The poles are 1943 and 2006, but there's no signal about how much of that span "forgotten" covers. Between them, they suggest that this story has been cast into one of the narrow set of themes newspapers use for war retrospectives. It's shaping up as a remembrance-and-forgetting tale. We're being left to wonder about rather a lot.

In October, cleaning out the house to begin renovations, the Bentleys found a Purple Heart medal, a 48-star American flag and battlefield letters from Army Pvt. Robert Lee Barringer -- the last written 16 days before he was killed on Sept. 22, 1943. He was 24.

Today at 10 a.m., Barringer will be forever remembered during a memorial service behind the Harrisburg Town Hall in Cabarrus County.

Uh, no. He can be remembered today at 1o, or he can be remembered forever, but he can't be remembered forever today at 10. But do you see the theme solidifying?

After that, his flag, medal and copies of the letters will go to the G.I. House Memorial Museum in Kannapolis, dedicated to preserving post-World War II history. The real letters and local newspaper clippings announcing his death will be preserved by archivists at the Cabarrus County Public Library.

How come letters from 1943 are going into a museum of postwar history? Just asking.

"I'm looking at a man who's basically been forgotten, who paid the price before he had a wife and children," said David Bentley, an Air Force veteran whose wife grew up in a military family.

... The Bentleys of Stanfield bought the two-bedroom Norwood house for an investment from Pauline Burris, Barringer's sister. Burris, who couldn't be reached, lives in a nursing home and is unable to make the service. All but one of her three sons, Barringer's nephews, were born after he was killed.

"Couldn't be reached" why? When did we start calling or visiting, and how hard did we try? Once again, I'm mystified. The reason could be anything: She could be in Tehran working on the coup. Or she could be in Branson. Or she could be long gone in dementia. We don't know. Which is convenient if the story's theme has already been decided on but pretty irritating if you're trying to figure out how well the facts fit the theme.

We can rough out an idea of how old she is: One son was born before Sept. 22, 1943. Let's say he was conceived at the beginning of the year. Let's put her toward the lower end of the possible age range and say she was 16 at that point. On those assumptions, she's pushing 80. And she could be older than the decedent. We don't know, and I'm starting to wonder why we don't know.

"They obviously didn't know these things had been left in the house," said Janice Bentley, who found the items stored with swatches of material. "They said they just didn't know him."

That damn pronoun again! Who's "they"? All three brothers, or one who's busy trying to finish up at work and get to mom's nursing home and doesn't have time to talk to nosy strangers about an uncle who died before he was born? What exactly did "they" say, and when did "they" say it? (And, of course, why didn't we try to get "them" to say it to "us"?) But a story on this theme has to have bad people who forget and good people who remember, so ...

Newspaper clippings report the Purple Heart was awarded posthumously to Barringer's parents, along with the flag. The Bentleys surmise those items were handed down to Burris.

Good guess. Also a pretty good sign that for at least some of the 63 years, he wasn't forgotten.

... The idea for today's service came from G.R. Bradley of Concord, commander of the Veterans Honor Guard in Cabarrus County. ... Moved by the story, Bradley offered to put together a service for Barringer and see that the items are preserved.

He has also launched a genealogical study on Barringer. They know from relatives that Barringer's great-grandfather died in a Civil War prison in New York. They are unsure where Barringer is buried.

Excuse me a second. Would this by any chance be the Robert Lee Barringer (entered service in North Carolina, died 22 September 1943) who's listed as buried in Plot C, Row 11, Grave 28 of the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Nettuno? Just wondering.

That's the sort of thing that takes about three minutes (we're still on dial-up here at the Manor) to find if you're interested. But you have to be interested -- not set on writing another story about how the young generation forgets but a few stalwarts help us remember.

The service will include a 21-gun salute, taps, speeches and readings from the letters and clippings.

Copyeds? Here's a rule. Whenever an obit says the decedent will receive a 21-gun salute, head at once to the city desk and ask: "When was he president?" Presidents get 21-gun salutes. Kings get 21-gun salutes. Soldiers usually get something like three rifle volleys.

"This man was doing his duty, talking about coming home and then his life is cut short," said Bradley, whose group has performed 80 military funerals this year. "He never knew the joy of children or grandchildren. He needs to be honored by getting his items into a place where they can be seen."

OK. Our writer doesn't know a rifle from an artillery piece. Our expert is averaging almost two military funerals a week but doesn't know about a resource as basic as the Battle Monuments Commission. And we poor readers are about where we were at the outset. We have no way of telling whether this is a valid account of memory and forgetting or a badly misconceived tale about somebody who was remembered as much as the others who died in 1943 right up until his sister went into the nursing home. Or anywhere between.

If it's the latter, we've basically hijacked someone's life for the purpose of telling a socially congruent story, and that's not very nice. It's hard to argue for holding a story whose time peg is "today." But if we can't produce some evidence that we've checked all the plausible counterindications, we could rewrite the thing into a simple report rather than a grand symphony of cultural verities.

OK, over to you characters. How do you explain it when your radar is going off?

No. David Crosby, maybe

Or maybe Charles Manson. The Intarwebs may have killed off a lot of journalism traditions (classified advertising and copydesk jobs, to name two), but the deity-on-foodstuffs tradition is alive and well -- right, Royal Oak Patch?

After severe storms, which DTE Energy called one of the 10th worst in its 111-year history, rumbled across Wayne County Friday and abruptly shut down the St. Andre Bessette Church Festival, there was something especially comforting about this food when the celebration resumed on Saturday.

Festival chairman Robert Heller told WXYZ, Channel 7 said a parishioner excitedly told him that Jesus must prefer Polish food to Mexican food, then presented a pierogi – a Polish dumpling – as evidence.

“I was shocked,” said Heller, who was making tacos at the time. “I looked at it, and you can definitely see the face of Jesus.”

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