The face of Goldstein

Why do you suppose this might be Wednesday afternoon's No. 2 story at America's Leading Cable News Network? One hates to be in the habit of quoting Orwell too often, but ... how does the Two Minutes Hate start off again?

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen.

If you wonder why people in your work unit don't throw things at the telescreen when Soros (or Alinsky, or Blumenthal, or Gruber) comes on, you're not looking in the right direction:

Billionaire George Soros gave $246 million to groups behind Wednesday's "Day Without a Woman" protest, according to a report by a conservative think tank.

Wednesday is "International Women's Day," and schools in at least four states canceled classes so teachers and staff members could participate in "Day Without a Woman" demonstrations.

While movement organizers say the demonstration is meant to spotlight gender inequality, critics say it is intended to protest President Donald Trump. The strike was created by the same organizers of the historic Women’s March on Washington in January, which drew hundreds of thousands in protest of the president.
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The enemy of the people

Q: How does the Washington Times revive the flagging spirits of the faithful after a potentially trying weekend?
A: With a picture of Emmanuel Goldstein, Enemy of the People George Soros in the centerpiece!

 Plagued by sagging ratings, player protests and fan outrage, the NFL has thrown a political Hail Mary by reportedly agreeing to dole out millions of dollars to two social justice groups connected to Democratic billionaire George Soros.

Under an agreement with the Players Coalition, NFL owners plan to funnel tens of millions of dollars to the Dream Corps, a leftist advocacy group led by former Obama adviser Van Jones and linked to Mr. Soros, which has called for saving the Clean Power Plan, cutting the prison population by half and providing “sanctuary for all.”

The $89 million, seven-year deal also carves out millions of dollars for the Players Coalition, according to ESPN, which has been advised by Soros-funded groups such as the Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth and the Center for American Progress, a leader of the anti-Trump “resistance.”

Could it get worse?

... Mr. Soros’ fingerprints can also be found on the Dream Corps, which merged in 2014 with Green for All, an environmental group founded by Mr. Jones in 2007 whose funders included Open Society as well as former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, according to Discover the Networks.

Mr. Jones resigned as President Obama’s “green jobs czar” in 2009 amid reports of his earlier Marxist activism, including his oft-quoted declaration that he became a communist after the 1992 acquittal of Los Angeles police officers who beat up Rodney King.

Any further questions about which side the Washington Times would have been on in the 1930s?

Immediately unclear

With just a few drops of Journalism® brand news routine, the slightly unusual can be transformed into the almost entirely incomprehensible! Let's watch as Fox (and the AP) show us how.

Cops: Naked man takes woman hostage in Illinois
ROCKFORD, Ill. — Police in Rockford, Illinois, have arrested a 32-year-old naked man who allegedly took a woman hostage and threw furniture out an apartment window during a standoff with authorities.

You can tell from the hed why this is a front-page story. It allows several triple-word-score-type hed terms ("naked," "woman" and "hostage") that automatically elevate a story's importance in Fox World. Regular readers can no doubt name some others: "missing," "pregnant," "mom" and "Marine," for example. So this isn't a perfect story -- "Naked Marine takes missing pregnant mom hostage"* would be closer -- but it's evidently a very, very good story.

The lede presents some problems, though. It's been second-cycled ("police arrest man," not "man takes hostage"), so it conflicts with the hed. Because it's active, it foregrounds the subject ("police") rather than the object ("fridge-hurling naked dude"). The adjective order is backward: It needs to distinguish one guy (naked) from other 32-year-old men, not one guy (age 32) from the other naked men strolling through downtown Rockford with ... you know, baseball bats in hand. (As we'll get to in a moment.) And I can't tell what's going on in the predicate of the relative clause. Does "allegedly"** go with both verbs, or just the taking? Did the hostage-taking happen during the standoff, or was that just the furniture-tossing?

Here's the lede from the originating paper. It's not exactly Homer (despite the syllepsis), but it is fairly clear about what went on:

A naked man locked himself in an apartment, hurling furniture and curse words out a window at police during a more-than-three-hour standoff Saturday afternoon.

But back to the AP:

No injuries were reported in yesterday's standoff which lasted more than three hours.

With fraternal greetings to both sides in the Great Which Hunt, let's suggest that the biggest problem isn't the use of "which" with restrictive (or "integrated relative") clauses. "A date which will live in infamy" is as clear as it gets. The problem is the lack of a comma to mark the nonrestrictive ("supplemental") clause, as above.

Kevin Bailey was charged with assault on a police officer, unlawful restraint and criminal damage to property.

According to the Rockford Register Star, police were called to an apartment after reports of a man knocking on doors with a baseball bat. (In the original, they were called to an apartment building, which is rather different, and it was "a man with a baseball bat knocking on doors," not "knocking on doors with a baseball bat." The urge to "improve" copy by screwing with it at random never goes away.)

Authorities say Bailey sprayed an officer with a fire extinguisher, ran into a woman's apartment and took her hostage. (Help me out on the sequence here, authorities -- and you too, AP. Bat in one hand, fire extinguisher in the other? Or did he drop the bat and then pick up the fire extinguisher?)

Bailey barricaded himself in a bathroom naked. He allegedly threw a television and dresser out the window.

Help! Has he been naked all this time? Or did nakedness ensue somewhere between the fire extinguisher scene and the bathroom? Has the hostage been released yet? (I'm not quite prepared to take the source paper's definition of "elderly" on faith -- there are reporters to whom it apparently means "50 or over" -- but from the original, this appears to have happened in city-run housing for the elderly, which seems worth mentioning.)

How hostage, and for that matter how naked, were the participants during the three-hour standoff? The AP doesn't say; we have to go back to the originating paper to find out that the initial call came at 1:48p and the woman had been freed by 2:15p; that's when the bathroom standoff began. It's still a little vague on when the protagonist went naked on us, but "police were called ... because of a man with a baseball bat knocking on doors" -- you figure we would have been told if it had been a naked man knocking on doors? But on to the thrilling conclusion:

It was immediately unclear if Bailey had an attorney.

This is not a pragmatic violation. The AP is second-cycling, remember, meaning it has to see if it can get some comment from the defense side. So it calls the cop shop and finds out -- well, most likely that nobody on duty knows if a lawyer's been appointed or hired or has seen the suspect. So AP can't provide a comment because it's not clear -- at least, not immediately -- whether there's someone it can find to provide a comment.

Somehow -- Strunk and Orwell, tag team of the century! -- somebody decided that the preceding concept had to be expressed in "positive form." Meaning, apparently, that we can't say what it wasn't (clear) when we can say what it was (unclear). The trouble is the adverb:

Wasn't immediately clear = wasn't clear when we called but might become clear soon
Was immediately unclear = all at once, it became unclear (as if the AP turned off the light on you, which is more or less what happened)

That's a lot of damage to do to a small amount of data -- particularly when you consider news writing's claim to put accuracy and clarity above all things. Makes you wonder why we spend so much time making fun of the academics.

* If you throw in a couple of automatic Fox villians, like George Soros and the U.N., you could get "Naked Soros takes missing pregnant Marine hostage at U.N." It's really motivational to know there's always a higher goal to shoot for.
** Yes, kiddies, it's still a dumb idea to think "allegedly" helps in a situation like this.

Nice Massster!

They really know how to write a lede over at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network, don't they?

President Trump tweeted soon after arriving to Saudi Arabia Saturday morning to kick off a nine-day international tour that will also take him to Israel and Europe.

“Great to be in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,” he tweeted, his first on international soil as president. “Looking forward to the afternoon and evening ahead.”

Enough drama. Let's have some historical context:

Trump is the only American president to visit Saudi Arabia, or any Muslim-majority country. The decision comes as he looks to show respect to the region after months of harsh anti-Muslim rhetoric that has surrounded his administration.

Weird, isn't it? Even if no one covering the Most Awesomest State Visit in History had ever heard of FDR* or any president (except Truman) since, you'd think someone might have read ahead:

... Melania Trump wore a black pantsuit with a golden belt and did not cover her head for the arrival, consistent with custom for foreign dignitaries visiting Saudi Arabia. In 2015, her husband had, in a tweet, criticized former first lady Michelle Obama for not wearing a headscarf during a visit to the kingdom.

Hold that thought, because there's a lot more Obama in the works, and admire the rest of a nearly perfect Fox front page. George Soros is funding treason again! North Korea GAAAAAAAAH! Liberals have no respect for Massster! Could it possibly get any better? Fortunately, Fox was hard at work helping you understand the day's events:

"No Bending Over" is pretty easy to follow, though the deck -- "Unlike Obama, Trump shakes Saudi king's hand" -- is a little bizarre, given that the picture actually shows Obama shaking the king's hand. But the point is clear: America is great again!

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The oxygen of publicity

Remember that cable network whose biggest issue last week was whether the opposition party moved fast enough to denounce antisemitic tropes? Here's your occasional reminder -- the No. 2 story on the homepage Wednesday, say -- that it's still pretty good at rolling around in the stuff itself. Let's start with a little paranoia:

Ever notice how certain people have started to disappear? Not vagrants or runaways, the usual missing persons. But fairly prominent, well-educated people with dissenting political opinions. One day you’re watching or reading them online. The next time you check, they’re gone. You can’t find their videos. They’re not showing up in your Facebook feed. Suddenly you can’t buy their books on Amazon.

You Google them to find out what happened and discover they’ve been banned. They’re being called dangerous extremists, bigots and Nazis. For the public good, they’ve been shut down. Disappeared.

You’re a little surprised to hear this. They didn’t seem evil or radical to you. They were just free thinkers, saying something a little different from the party line on CNN. You don’t complain about it, though. You don’t want anyone to know you were watching forbidden videos. There’s a penalty for that.

This is what an authoritarian society looks like. It’s a place where the group in charge will tolerate no criticism at all. That’s what we’re becoming.

It was only a matter of time before they came for Fox News. Of the top dozen news networks in the United States, only Fox has an alternative view. The other channels speak with one voice. They are united on every issue, every time. They’re in almost perfect sync with the priorities of the Democratic Party.

Reminding one a little of the finest tweet of 2017: "First they came for Katie Hopkins and I did not speak, because I'd been waiting ages for them to come for Katie Hopkins." But back to the story at hand, because you'll need to keep wading another four paragraphs to get to its lone mention of the evildoer in the photo:

... That’s where Media Matters comes in. Media Matters is a George Soros-funded lobbying organization whose sole mission is to punish critics of the Democratic Party. Media Matters often uses propaganda from the Southern Poverty Law Center to bully corporations, news executives and tech companies into punishing people it doesn’t like. Not surprisingly, the media love Media Matters.

Nothing like a little worldwide conspiracy to get the fans going, huh?

For the record, should anyone care, I don't think Tucker Carlson ought to be silenced. (Not that he or his viewpoints at at any risk of such a fate, but that's a different matter.) I'd much rather he be ignored -- starved of the oxygen of publicity, as Maggie Thatcher put it. Maybe he'd have a different attitude if he went to bed hungry and cried himself to sleep.