Media Gripes: Yes, Details Matter

 

The World Needs More Copy Editors

The conservative website Newsmax, whose mission statement possibly requires it to publish every inflammatory, derisive remark about “Obamacare” made by a right-wing politician, makes a particularly amusing slip in an article about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s response to the SCOTUS ruling. Ignoring for a moment the inaccuracy of Rubio’s “the IRS is coming!” rhetoric, I’m enjoying the irony of the following line appearing in a piece about health care:

These are things to talk about in a reasonable way, but we don’t have to sick the IRS on people in order to do that.

Yes, Obama is planning to sic the IRS on sick people.

 

My Compliments to the Copy Staff

Finding further schadenfreude in errors from the right-wing Internet universe, where the English-only crowd proves unable to use the English language correctly itself:

Warner, a former governor who remains the most popular statewide office holder in Virginia, was overtly complementary of the president, much to the crowds delight, even though he has in the past criticized Obama’s attacks on Romney’s tenure at the investment firm Bain Capital.

Did Warner and Obama wear matching suits too?

 

That’s a Downer

As a political commentator, Peggy Noonan draws a lot of mean-spirited laughter from the left. It’s not undeserved; she regularly projects her own feelings of “ennui” about the current campaign onto her Platonic ideal of “average Americans,” and the hagiographic tone she takes toward “job creators” is truly humorous. (Sample: local businesspeople are “surprised by their own passion” at the prospect of Condoleeza Rice as VP and “relieved, like a campaign was going on and big things might happen.”) Ed Kilgore of the Washington Monthly laces into Noonan’s latest claim that “Every voter in the country knows we have to get a hold of spending and begin to turn it around,” by remarking:

It seems that Peggy is saying every voter in the country thinks just like her. How’s that for some hubris? No “deep down in their hearts” qualifier, no hedging of bets on 100% omniscience about 100% of voters. Amazing.

That Noonan was a speechwriter for President Reagan makes this sort of writing, about the upward tick in Obama’s poll numbers, all the more cringe-worthy:

For the first time in months, the president looks like he’s on the Uppalator, not the Downalator . . . .

Is this the Wall Street Journal or the classroom blog of a third-grade teacher? I half-expect to see motivational kitten posters and gold stars affixed to the end of the column. If you want evidence that standards at the WSJ have slipped under Rupert Murdoch, look no further than Noonan’s descent into banality.

 

Manufactured Scandal

The Washington Examiner prides itself on exposing “corruption” in Obama’s sprawling socialist leviathan. And the president isn’t the only member of the Obama family held up for criticism; indeed, any item that mentions the First Lady garners an outsize number of comments (“Moochelle” appears to be a favorite epithet.) The ignorance of random readers can be excused; while it’s easy to laugh at comments about Michelle Obama’s lavish $20 million vacations, even upmarket papers like the NYT attract screeds about the way Citizens United is single-handedly destroying democracy and why Dick Cheney should be tried for war crimes. It’s harder, however, to be generous when actual reporters display a deficiency of logic:

President Obama’s Agriculture Department, which forms an integral part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s war on childhood obesity, announced it will provide a $25 million loan guarantee to support the manufacture of a sweetener used in soda pop beverages.

Myriant Technologies will use the loan guarantee to build a plant in Louisiana. “The facility will make succinic acid, which is used primarily as a sweetener within the food and beverage industry,” the USDA noted. Diet cola beverages in particular rely on succinic acids, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

There’s a free-market argument to be made against loan guarantees in general. (And there’s even an argument to be made against the unambitious pet projects chosen by First Ladies.) But the writer accuses Michelle Obama of hypocrisy because her anti-obesity campaign somehow conflicts with support for artificial sweeteners . . . by a cabinet department over which she has no authority. Ignoring the fact that Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack hardly runs financial decisions past the East Wing, is the Examiner really implying that zero-calorie sodas are a major driver of obesity? There’s some dubious research out there about diet drinks contributing to weight gain (though not necessarily obesity), but the Examiner doesn’t even try to bring that up. “USDA Hands Out Free Happy Meals” — now that’s a headline that could reasonably spark allegations of hypocrisy. But considering that the soda portion of the classic McDonald’s order (“I’d like a Big Mac, large fries . . . and a Diet Coke”) is hardly to blame for 300-pound teenagers, the “journalists” working for the Examiner should look for a more coherent way to smear the First Lady.

 

Freudian Slip in the Comments Section

As I said above, reader comments can’t be held to the same standard as articles by actual journalists. But I found this next slip amusing, especially considering how far the NYT has gone to inject its own bias into reporting of, say, the Citizens United ruling. (No, SCOTUS did not write “corporations are people,” though the idea is not exactly revolutionary.) If the Times’ newsroom can’t even bring itself to avoid the misconception that Citizens decision allowed a “tidal wave” of “secret donations,” what can we expect from the average reader?

After the Washington, D.C. budget diabolical earlier this year, while republicans decisions made decent folks angry by planting their backsides deep in the soil, it’s a wonder if our elected officials take their jobs seriously.

Leaving aside the odd image of politicians “planting their backsides deep in the soil” — are they digging in their heels or digging trenches with their rear ends?), “debacle” has morphed into “diabolical.” Please, tell us what you really think about Republican obstructionism.

 

Unfortunate Headlines

Bloomberg News gives this advice to the gowns-and-mortarboards crowd:

Grads: Skip the Bank Job, Join a Startup

A wise suggestion: The next Twitter, yes; felony record, no.

 

Even SpellCheck Should Have Caught This One . . . .

From a Newsweek subhead:

The chief justice proved that his court is more than an ideological rubber stamp, writes Robert Shrum. Plus, Howard Kurtz on how Roberts rised above partisanship and Obama’s big win.

 

. . . . But Someone Did Catch This One

A recent Politico headline about the Washington Post’s article on Mitt Romney’s legacy at Bain Capital:

WaPo will not retract ‘outsourcing’ story

Take a look at the hyperlink, which suggests that someone made a last-minute save:

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/06/washpost-will-not-redact-outsourcing-story-127466.html

What might the Post’s front page have looked like in that scenario?

Grammar is Next to Godliness

In eighth grade, at the last assembly of middle school, I won the School Grammarian award. This was not much of an honor; it was, like most of the “awards” passed out that day, made up by the school’s algebra teacher. I seem to remember a few kids getting real prizes, or at least real in the sense that they were printed on some gold-border certificate paper from Staples and handed out in front of the rest of the student body, which was sprawled over half the gym floor in half-sitting, half-sleeping slouches. We didn’t have chairs at Oak Hill, ostensibly because we were an “independent” private school, but actually because no one had bothered to budget for 100 folding chairs.

The place was a strange combination of bare-bones accounting — an old ranch building was co-opted for the schoolhouse, and the bedroom they converted into my grade four classroom was so small that the inside door blew open every time the outside door was pulled shut — and top-of-the-line furnishings. For Oak Hill’s debut year, every student sat in his own cushy, fabric-covered rolling office chair, until the teachers convinced the school’s wealthy, wine-magnate founder that such chairs were more appropriate for board members and CEOs than a bunch of third-graders predisposed to spinning wildly in their seats and holding chair races across the classroom.

But I digress. The awards assembly was, as it turned out, a similar combination of off-the-cuff theatrics and prep-school (or wannabe prep-school, considering the delinquents and socially odd students the school tended to attract) ceremony. The graduating eighth grade class comprised only nine students, and I assume one or two of those kids received actual commendations, most likely for their math skills or acting talent. The School Grammarian award was a joke, but I took it seriously, and made it up to the front of the gym before realizing that there was no certificate for me to collect or microphone at which to give an acceptance speech. I did an awkward hand-shake dance with my math teacher and returned to my “seat” — backpack as headrest, legs crossed at the ankles in an “I’m not sleeping” position — with my face burning.

I’d like to think that I’ve grown less awkward since that eighth-grade assembly, but I know the grammarian in me has not disappeared. In an ideal world, I would get my act together and find a job copy-editing. It’s not the most glamorous profession, but it has the advantage of feeling a lot more obtainable than a job in the ad industry or at a publishing house. I get massive, procrastination-aided anxiety whenever I try to write. You know what they say: Those who can’t do, teach. That’s not quite true — I’ve had plenty of teachers who could out-“do” the smartest Jeopardy contestant — but it is perhaps accurate that those who can’t write are destined to edit. With that in mind, here are two of the sharpest bits I’ve read lately on the importance of the right word in the right place:

From the March 2011 issue of Oprah Magazine, a piece called “Before I Forget,” by Beth Macy:

Lynn Forbish. The sight of that name in your e-mail in-box could turn your palms sweaty and your face red. No matter how many years you’ve logged as a journalist or how many awards you’ve won, a note from the Queen of the Copy Desk could bring you to your knees: “Never use five words when one will suffice — just don’t make it one of your usual cliches.”

Frankly, were I the copy editor at Oprah, I would’ve deep-sixed that hyphen: “Inbox,” not “in-box.” But who knows. I suppose I should find out what the AP Stylebook has to say on the subject. But whatever the answer, I’d still love to be Queen of the Copy Desk. Someday, when I finally get around to “getting my act together,” maybe I’ll have that engraved on a nameplate.

Christopher Hitchens, in the June 2011 edition of Vanity Fair, remembers receiving this advice from a writing teacher, possibly William Safire. (Aside: Safire, like Hitchens himself, was a great writer with dubious political beliefs.) In “Unspoken Truths,” Hitchens writes:

The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro.

Again, the copy editor in me longs to make a change. As I typed, my fingers automatically inserted a comma after “boy.” Should there be a comma there? No. It could probably go either way, but I’m not about to say Christopher Hitchens made an error. I may not agree with a lot of Hitchens’ libertarian dogma, but there are elements of his politics that I do subscribe to, and like Safire, his talent with words is undeniable.

As for me? Check back in a few years. Maybe I’ll have that nameplate after all.