While Smoking Outside a Bar...

[aggienaut]

A Yahoo-News headline intro paragraph yesterday:

"Police and FBI agents captured an ex-convict suspected of killing eight people in two states as he smoked a cigarette outside of a southwestern Illinois bar Tuesday night"

Holy shit, killed eight people across two states while smoking a cigarette outside a bar? Thats one dangerous dude!!! ;)


I love badly worded news items.

Comments

[nocturneprime.livejournal.com]

That's just pure talent that is

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I'm constantly amazed by how much I can be disappointed by professional journalists. See also my recent entries on journalism's collective inability to correctly identify why they use "30" and in failing to critically analyze.

[unoriginalmoron.livejournal.com]

yahoo news is the worst, too. although lately i saw some poorly worded items in the oc register that made me want to bludgeon somebody. the local section had three different columns with sentences that couldn't agree on past or present tense.

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

Yeah the OC Register also keeps pissing me off by writing completely unresearched articles about bees. They just interview whomever they happen to stumble into and run it like it its ironclad .. frequently with egregious errors.

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

OK, I understand that the newspaper no longer presumably has the funds to pay an editor to check everyone's work. But if the person's a professional writer, they ought to have the knowledge to double and triple check their own work. Secondly, the newspaper could institute a policy whereby each writer had to have a colleague proof-read their work. And finally, there is spell check.

I've always said, the way to know how poorly written the newspaper is is to have them write something about you.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Are you implying I'M the ex-convict? I will have you know I would NEVER smoke, outside an Illinois bar or otherwise! ;)

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

But if doing so would allow you to kill eight people in two states, maybe??