Archive for the &;copyediting&; Category
ABC News Finds Ft. Hood KillerCaptivating
November 9, 2009
Doesn&;t anybody around here understand writing or usage? I know I sound like grammarian schoolmarm, but ABC&;s story on &;alleged&; mass murderer Major Nidal Malik Hasan was even more poorly written than usual. The first sentence reads:
&;Days after a mass shooting at the Fort Hood Army post in Killeen, Texas, details of the gunman&;s life have captivated millions looking for motives behind Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan&;s murderous rampage.&;
Yes, captivating. Not.
To captivate means to capture attention in a positive way, as in &;Miley Cyrus captivated her tween audience.&;
Captivating=delightful.
What&;s next for ABC&;s incompetent news writers? Why not &;the antics of the terrorist murderer captivated the public&;s attention&;?
Tags:ABC, death-of-journalism, news-incompetence, Nidal-Malik-Hasan, terrorism Posted in ABC-News, copyediting | Leave a Comment &;
LA Times: John Lennon Buying in HancockPark
May 25, 2009
No, it&;s not a descent into the world of the Weekly World News, merely a copyediting error in Hot Property (below.) In other words, not deliberate, just incompetent.
When does the newspaper as public trust become a public joke?
Hot Property
&;Reno 911&; actor John Lennon buys Hancock Park-area house for $2,175,000. Hot property photos
Tags:death-of-copyediting, John-Lennon, Los-Angeles-Times, Reno-911, sloppy-journalism, tabloid-journalism Posted in copyediting, death-of-newspapers, tabloid-journalism | 1 Comment &;
LA Times Invents FordMalibu
October 30, 2008
The Los Angeles Times, laying off yet another 75 journalists this week, is living in the past. The paper is running a 7-part front page story about the good old days of &;The Gangster Squad&;, and how they illegally bugged and harassed gangsters like Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel in the 1940&;s.
Meanwhile, in the same issue (Sunday, October 26, 2008) a staffer writing about Barack Obama&;s outreach to Latinos in Las Vegas wrote that one of the individuals interviewed was &;trying to make a living buying and selling automobiles&; and &;pointed to two Ford Malibus in the frontyard.&;
The writer wrote me to apologize, but the accuracy of such an &;insignificant&; detail (in a Sunday paper with a circulation of one million) means either the Times editorial staff has zero knowledge about America&;s auto industry and its products (it&;s a Chevy Malibu, unless it was a Ford Mustang, Focus or Fusion) or that the factchecking and copyediting staff has been decimated in the cutbacks. (Or maybe the Times took a Philip K. Dick-like look into the future, merging the struggling automakers.)
Either way, such obvious errors call into question the accuracy of the whole journalistic enterprise. No wonder the Times wants to run a series on long-dead gangsters. As with the ghost story my editor at the Enquirer urged me to embellish, they won&;t be suing.
Tags:Bugsy-Siegel, Ford, Ford-Malibu, gangsters, General-Motors, LA-Times, Mickey-Cohen Posted in copyediting, death-of-newspapers, Journalism | 2 Comments &;