Readers are newspaper’s watchdogs

It’s pretty hard to slip one by the eagle-eyed readers of this newspaper, even when the item is shoehorned into a remote corner of Page 11 in Section C, as was the case a couple of weeks ago when an Associated Press article reported that the British consul general had been one of the victims of a cowardly suicide bombing in Istanbul two days earlier.

The second paragraph of the three-paragraph story was the show-stopper for readers Louisa and Joe Malizia of Surry. It reported that the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had recently visited the consul general, “spoke of the ‘generous and warm hospitality’ he received from the diplomat and his wife three days after suicide bombers killed 23 people in two synagogue attacks in Istanbul…”

The couple sent me the clipping as an example of what they called “another great example of writer’s English” in our newspaper. Their note indicated that they thought a swell headline for the story might be “Dead Diplomat is Dull Host.”

The clipping is one of many such minor journalistic lapses that routinely wind up in my in-basket, courtesy of readers who love to share their finds with a kindred spirit, who, having been trapped in the minefield of the murky sentence on occasion, always enjoys a knowing chuckle at the expense of his cronies in the news biz.

As veteran syndicated columnist James Kilpatrick once put it, “We may laugh at the mangled sentence, ‘Rosemary started cooking herself when she was 18,’ but we are not laughing with the writer, we are laughing at him…”

The clips show what havoc such sloppy structure can wreak when a reporter, copy editor or headline writer doesn’t take the time to hold his work at arm’s length and give it one more read before sending it off to that big master computer in the basement to be preserved for the ages in cold, unforgiving and permanent type on the pages of the morning paper.

“Last-minute Accusations Postpone Episcopal Vote,” blared the headline in the Portland Press Herald a while back. And under it, this sub-headline: “An e-mail accuses the Rev. V. Gene Robinson of inappropriate touching just before a vote on his selection as bishop.”

Faced with that one, a reader’s first logical thought might be, “Geez. What lousy timing. You’d think the guy could have contained himself at least until after they had taken the vote…” Turns out that the inappropriate touching hadn’t happened just before the vote. Rather, what had occurred at the last minute was the allegation of an earlier inappropriate touching – a significant difference that even a non-nitpicker should catch, I would think.

Still, nitpicking is probably the way for readers to go when they find themselves hard up for amusement during a lull in the action. Such as late on Thanksgiving Day, when reader Malcolm Hughes e-mailed me to advise that the morning newspaper had carried “a wonderful blooper on the bottom of Page 3.”

The item in the “Names in the News” section reported that Harvey Fierstein, described as “Broadway’s most famous drag queen,” would “dress as Mrs. Santa Claus while riding down Fifth Avenue” in the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

Hughes, who, probably like most readers, suspected that Fierstein would, in fact, dress before the parade began, wrote that he “would certainly pay to see ol’ Harvey dressing as Mrs. Santa while riding on a float along Fifth Avenue. The idea boggles the mind. I mean, does he start off in red long johns, or red panty hose? Do they play a bump-and-grind version of ‘Here Comes Santa Claus’ while he takes his walk-about clothes off, and then something appropriate, e.g., ‘What Are You Doing New Year’s, New Year’s Eve?’ while he puts on his Mrs. Claus outfit?” Good questions.

With television bloopers, when there is no printed word to hold in your nitpicking hand while you parse the dubious sentence, the trick is to write down the gaffe while it is still fresh in your mind.

On the day that the supersonic Concorde aircraft made its final flight across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, a pert NBC reporterette announced that the plane had made the crossing “faster than twice the speed of light.” When I did the mental math, I concluded that the plane had thus arrived in Europe at roughly the same time it had taken off from New York. I suppose the lady meant to say that the plane had traveled at twice-plus the speed of sound. But maybe not.

Ah, well. Light … sound … whatever. Who cares, as long as Ravishing News Babe is easy on the eyes on the 6 o’clock news.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.