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?

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, gave a lecture at the University of Mississippi that challenges this point of view head-on.

It's offered here without comment, save for a small one at the end. I'd love to read yours in the comments section.

Some excerpts:

The decline of newspapers is not about the replacement of the antiquated technology of news print with the lightning speed of the Internet. It does not signal an inevitable and salutary change. It is not a form of progress. The decline of newspapers is about the rise of the corporate state, the loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world, a world where information is conveyed primarily through rapidly moving images rather than print.

The Internet will not save newspapers. Although all most newspapers have Web sites, and have had for a while, newspaper Web sites make up less than 10 percent of newspaper ad revenue. Advertisers have not gravitated to newspaper sites, either unsure of how to use the Internet or suspicious that it can’t match the viewer attention of older media. And the decline of revenues means an assault on the very heart of the news – the ability to gather and produce news. No internet site will ever bring in the kind of revenue that allows a large newspaper, such as The Los Angeles Times, to field a newsroom staff – a staff which even with all its lay offs — still employs 700 people.

Those who rely on the Internet gravitate to sites that reinforce their beliefs. The filtering of information through an ideological lens, which is destroying television journalism, defies the purpose of reporting. Journalism is about transmitting information that doesn’t care what you think. Reporting challenges, countermands or destabilizes established beliefs. Reporting, which is time-consuming and often expensive, begins from the premise that there are things we need to know and understand, even if these things make us uncomfortable. If we lose this ethic we are left with pandering, packaging and partisanship. We are left awash in a sea of competing propaganda. Bloggers, unlike most established reporters, rarely admit errors. They cannot get fired. Facts, for many bloggers, are interchangeable with opinions. Take a look at The Drudge Report. This may be the new face of what we call news.

We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. And this assault has been a body blow to a free press, which is, like the humanities, designed to promote intellectual and moral questioning. The confusion of bread and circus with news means that social critics, those who do not shout clichés on cable news shows, but who challenge and question the assumptions and structures of the corporate state itself are left without a voice.

We are cleverly entertained during our descent. We have our own version of ancient Rome’s bread and circuses with our ubiquitous and elaborate spectacles, sporting events, celebrity gossip and television reality shows. Societies in decline, as the Roman philosopher Cicero wrote, see their emotional and political passions subsumed by the excitement and emotional life of the arena.

Television journalism is largely a farce. Celebrity reporters, masquerading as journalists, who make millions a year give a platform to the powerful and the famous so they can spin, equivocate, and lie. Sitting in a studio, putting on makeup, and chatting with Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, or Lawrence Summers has little to do with journalism. If you are a true journalist, you should start to worry if you make $5 million a year. No journalist has a comfortable, cozy relationship with the powerful. No journalist believes that serving the powerful is a primary part of his or her calling. Those in power fear and dislike journalists – and they should. Ask Amy Goodman, Seymour Hersh, Walter Pincus, Robert Scheer or David Cay Johnston.

You can see the entire speech here.

I've often said that my fear isn't for the form of the journalism -- newsprint, pixel, film, sound. It doesn't matter. Give me the format that best suits the information.

No, I fear for the underlying journalism itself. If we lose that, we lose everything.

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.

John McIntyre, in a blog post titled "The Errant Hand," deconstructs the unfortunate apostle/apostate case at the Brigham Young University newspaper and offers a few lessons.

Chief among them: don't use the correct-all function on your otherwise handy spellcheck program.

But John's post is so much more than that, so I encourage you to read it in its entirety. In this paragraph, he gets at the heart of the errors that bedevil those of us in the word-pushing game:

Readers react to blunders of that magnitude by asking how anyone could be so ignorant/careless/stupid. But every copy editor maintains a private roll of shame over just such lapses. We run down the list as we lie awake on still winter nights. The wrong synapse fires, or the hand slips, there’s a momentary distraction, or there is pressure to hurry on deadline — and if you think that it wouldn’t happen to you, then you have never worked on a copy desk, a locale that regularly reinforces humility.

Here, then, are a few of the big-picture rules for editors who wish to remain on the sunny side of their sanity:

1. Never use correct-all (all the better for avoiding phrases such as "in the African-American" and "Enola Homosexual").

2. Never type anything into the system that you would be embarrassed to see in print.

3. Never re-create standing elements (labels, nameplates, etc.) out of whole cloth every day, lest you misspell something. A paper at which I formerly toiled once rendered its name, on the front page, as the "Anchorage Daiy News." No amount of equivocation can soothe that sting.

Any other nominations?

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:

There’s a reason we - and I’m using the royal we here - don’t like to play gotcha games, even if our business is finding and correcting mistakes.

Jon Stewart’s bust of the finger-wagging crew over at Fox News illustrates that reason.

We’re not sure how this evaded our attention for nearly three weeks*, but we’re grateful to Editrix for pointing it out. * - Slothfulness, probably.