My Billings Gazette

Our good friend John McIntyre cited this a while ago, and it's only because of my own sloth that I'm so late in picking it up. Nonetheless, time's passage has not diminished its brilliance.

What is it, you ask? A language smackdown by the esteemed Geoffrey Pullum on Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer.

The item is so short and devastating, like a well-thrown uppercut, that excerpting can't do it justice. Here's a little taste: "Don't lurk behind a putative linguistic observation because you think it will sound more like someone who went to college." Now, run along and read the whole thing.

Here's something else that demands your attention: Wordnik. The interface is so simple and so abundantly cool that it requires no preamble. Just click and have it. (Also, drop in the juvenile words, if you must. I did.)

I have given you joy and a toy. What more could you want?

You might recall Ralph Keyes and his zeal for ridding journalism of retro references.

Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post has a fitting response.

Read it here.

Yesterday, in a post about readers' complaints of bias in newspaper reporting, I asked folks to sound off on two headlines and whether they perceived bias in them.

Only one person played, and that reader said, in essence, "Bring on the bias. I can decide for myself."

Still, I said I would offer my take, and here it is:

HEADLINE NO. 1

"Ford to city: Drop dead," from the New York Daily News in 1979.

This headline, referring to President Gerald Ford's refusal to consider a federal bailout (see -- not entirely a new term) for New York City, is one of the most famous ever written. And it's undeniably biased, turning a political position by Ford into an inflammatory statement.

As Andy Bechtel noted a couple of weeks ago, Ford considered the headline "very unfair" and blamed it for his loss to Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Two things to bear in mind here, however: First, it's a tabloid headline, and the rules are considerably different -- and more liberal -- for those publications than for upmarket broadsheets. Second, while the headline certainly comes from a point of view, it also has that pulling-for-the-hometown-team quality. The same headline wouldn't work in Dubuque. In New York, for the Daily News, it was nearly pitch-perfect.

(By the way, the obituary for the man who wrote the headline is worth reading. Thanks again to Andy for that.)

HEADLINE NO. 2

"Bush rallies GOP faithful" with a secondary headline of "Students soak up spectacle."

This one dates to a couple of years ago, when President George W. Bush visited Billings for a Republican rally at MetraPark. We caught a little bit of grief for the secondary headline (full disclosure: I wrote it), with a few readers saying that the word "spectacle" mocked Bush.

I don't see it. I certainly wasn't thinking it. By any measure, the event that day was a spectacle: Local and statewide politicians shared the stage with the president, firing up voters as an election approached. Faithful Republicans and others wanting to see it crammed into MetraPark for the event. We gave it big coverage, and deservedly so.

Had we written that Bush "made a spectacle of himself," we would have received a well-deserved paddling from readers. But the problem there isn't the word spectacle; it's the supporting words around it.

The reader advocate at the Salt Lake Tribune, Connie Coyne, filed a column this week about the perception of bias in the newspaper's headlines.

I know you'll find this difficult to believe, but we here at The Gazette regularly receive similar complaints from readers -- that we tilt left or right in our coverage.

You may also find this difficult to believe: We take note of such complaints, and our editor, Steve Prosinski, is thorough in following up with those who take the time to register their displeasure. He also follows up with the folks who write the headlines (I'm one of them) when a reader has made a salient point.

A few broad concepts before we proceed:

1. There is not a thinking person alive who doesn't have a point of view, and that includes journalists. The duty is to approach news coverage in a fair, even-handed way, giving the fullest possible story in a manner that is proportionate to the news value and interest level of the topic.

2. Many -- perhaps most -- strident complaints of bias come from a position of bias that is the direct opposite of the complaint. Anyone whose depth of intellectual rigor is consumption of Right-Leaning Pundit A or Left-Leaning Pundit B is likely to spot all instances of bias except his own.

3. Balance is a more complicated concept than simply granting equal time. A story that gives equal time to a NASA scientist and a flat-earther is not balanced.

With exceptions that are so rare as to be statistically insignificant, the people I've worked with in 20-plus years as a professional journalist have been dedicated to facts, not political positions. No single concept gets talked about in newsrooms as much as that one, and the colleagues with whom I've worked have been uniformly focused on that ideal. Does that mean we always attain our ideals? No. Do we occasionally let lazy or loaded language into our stories or headlines? Yes. But in every case I can think of, it has happened because someone rushed or took his or her eye off the ball, not because of some vast conspiracy to push across a certain position.

This brings us to the interactive portion of our post. I'll give you two headlines -- one that's quite famous, and one that appeared in The Gazette a couple of years ago. In the comments section, you tell me whether it's biased and why:

HEADLINE 1: "Ford to city: Drop dead"

HEADLINE 2: "Bush rallies GOP faithful" with a secondary headline of "Students soak up spectacle"

I look forward to your answers. I'll post my take on the two headlines tomorrow.

This article, by author Ralph Keyes, has been bandied about in journalism circles for the past few days. Keyes' point, in a nutshell: Our insistence on dated pop-culture references is driving away young readers.

Keyes writes:

Retrotalk is ubiquitous among journalists of a certain age. By using it they set themselves apart from those born in the last three or four decades. On "Meet the Press," New York Times columnist David Brooks said about Hillary Clinton, “In the first debate she’s Emily Post, now she’s Howard Beale,” referring to the late etiquette maven and the angry protagonist of the 1976 movie "Network." In a recent column Brooks wrote, “And not to get Rod McKuen on you or anything …” Say what? Inquiring younger minds want to know.

Now, I hate to be a nattering nabob of negativism (a phrase coined used by Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1970, which predates my memory), but Keyes is flat wrong unless he includes two important adjectives to his proposed reining-in: "lazy" and "inappropriate." If that were the crux of Keyes' fight, I would stand with him. Few things come across as weakly as a poorly employed pop-culture reference.

Otherwise, I suspect that he isn't being intellectually honest about how these references foment and perpetuate. Kids who never saw "Happy Days" during its heyday nonetheless use a phrase inspired by the show, "jump the shark" -- or, at least, they did until the phrase itself jumped the shark.

A friend of mine, age 39, signs off on Facebook every night with "Goodnight, Gracie." The program that made it famous, "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show," went off the air 12 years before he was born.

These gems live on because they're passed down, from generation to generation, whether it's from parent to child or through the wonder of syndicated television. You didn't have to be alive during the original run of "Gilligan's Island" or "Leave it to Beaver" to get the references -- those shows are playing, somewhere, every day. In fact, I daresay that the greater risk lies in making reference to current pop culture, when we don't have the benefit of the years to know whether something is enduring or just a passing fad.

Wisteria Lane is now. Mayberry, as noted by one commenter, is eternal.

I think we can all agree that a solid grounding in the principles of grammar is essential to good writing.

Still, one can never discount the effect of dialect, particularly in the cutthroat world of sales.

Consider this classified ad, which ran in The Billings Gazette this past week:

1990 Olds Delta 88 Royal. Grandma can't drive no more. 42,000 original miles. 3.8L Automatic. Cruise, Tilt, Nice, Nice Car. XXX-XXXX.*

Let me be the first to say that I'm sorry Grandma can't drive no more. I'm even more sorry that I'm not in the market for a car; Delta 88s are sweet rides. When I was 18, I drove one from North Richland Hills, Texas, to Kit Carson, Colo., and that's a long damned way.

* -- Phone number redacted to keep self-important grammar scolds from bothering grandma and the kinfolk.

I received an e-mail from the delightful Editrix today. She wanted to know how I would turn hit-and-run into a plural, a question she also asked of her blog audience.

My response: