هذه المبادرة من حزب الأمة ربما هي مخرج من الهرجلة الحالية

2009-03-31T14:39:00.000-07:00

News stories need to be clear. They all too often are anything but.

These sorta tidbits are not very helpful:

"A message left on McCarl's answering machine wasn't immediately returned, and jail officials say they have no record of an attorneyfor her."

Who the hell cares? Look closely - and you'll find plenty of news stories chock full of them.

Or what about this gem: "The man told police the incident occurred in November. It wasn't immediately clear when it was reported."

Huh?

Here's another: "Police said they did not know if she had an attorney and a phone listing for her inDilworth could not be found." Wow - THAT's some hard-hitting news reportage. Now we know the rest of the story. Sorry, Paul - R.I.P. and all...

But there's a lot of this fluf - padding out otheriwise fun wacky news. Each of these ids from one of those got-drunk-got-stupid-got-busted kind of stories I love to read.

And all of them suffer from the same sorta shit: "His name and condition were not released."

I could barely hang on to the last sentence - "Panus isn't sure why he was naked, or why he jumped." This is great copy - fucked over by the inclusion of inane non-information. Why?

The last line of the story is "The official had no attorney information and a phonelisting for Jones could not be found."

The FIRST line of the story "Deputies say they found a toddler wandering alone on a Texas street and methamphetamine and more than a dozen snakes in his mother's home" does NOT deserve to be slaughtered by the little anti-paragraph about how we don't know about a lawyer. It's a shame.

One need not even know that there's a rest of the story - the double-speak is so stultifyingly stupid. "Dvir is being held at the Jefferson County Jail under $100,000bail. The jail had no information on whether she had an attorney, and no home phone could be found. Nedlin has remarried." That one borders on a lie. No phone could be found? Bullshit. We didn't find one.

These nuggets of nonsense often wrap a story - the last bit to meet a word-count quota. But sometimes they show up right in the header. "A man armed with a black handgun tied up a female employee and fired shots during a robbery." - Clarifying it wasn't a silver hangun, or say green.

I tried to make a few phone calls to find out what fucked-up quasi-rule dictates such dumbass dogma but "A woman answering a phone listing for Amber Carter inBellefontaine hung up on a call seeking comment Wednesday."

2009-03-17T11:52:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Metric Shitload. More to come...

The Metric Shitload

هذه المبادرة من حزب الأمة ربما هي مخرج من الهرجلة الحالية