Associated Press, Joe Klein, and more (Creative writing hits the wires)

The Weekly Standard ^ | March 28, 2005 | The Scrapbook

[RWR8189]

"Creative" Writing at the Associated Press

The Associated Press, that self-described "backbone of the world's information system," still boasts an impressive 1,700 U.S. newspapers among its clients. But for some time now, it seems, a fair number of those papers have been complaining to The Backbone that the news dispatches sent over its wires just don't cut it anymore. Specifically, as AP managing editor Mike Silverman all but explicitly acknowledged in a client advisory distributed last week, the wire service's customary who-what-when-where-why approach to major "spot stories" increasingly guarantees that those stories will already be stale by the time they reach most readers' doorsteps.

So "in response to what we've been hearing from many editors--that you need to be able to offer your readers something fresh so they will want to pick up the newspaper and read a story, even though the facts have been splashed all over the Web and widely broadcast"--Silverman promised his subscribers something new. "It's called the Optional Lead." And it'll work like this:

AP will henceforth report significant news developments, especially morning-hour events, in two distinct versions. "One will be the traditional 'straight lead' that leads with the main facts of what took place." And the other, at least in its opening sentences, will take "an alternative approach that attempts to draw in the reader through imagery, narrative devices, perspective or other creative means"--though still managing, at the same time, to somehow "present the main facts of what happened in the top few grafs," just like a straight-style write-up.

You are confused, perhaps? Don't be. Mr. Silverman was kind enough to include with his advisory "a couple of recent examples from the wire." Here's one of them:

 

Traditional
Mosul, Iraq (AP). A suicide attacker set off a bomb that tore through a funeral tent jammed with Shiite mourners Thursday, splattering blood and body parts over rows of overturned white plastic chairs. The attack, which killed 47 and wounded more than 100, came as Shiite and Kurdish politicians in Baghdad said they overcame a major stumbling block to forming a new coalition government.

Optional
Mosul, Iraq (AP). Yet again, almost as if scripted, a day of hope for a new, democratic Iraq turned into a day of tears as a bloody insurgent attack undercut a political step forward. On Thursday, just as Shiite and Kurdish politicians in Baghdad were telling reporters that they overcame a major stumbling block to forming a new coalition government, a suicide attacker set off a bomb that tore through a funeral tent jammed with Shiite mourners in the northern city of Mosul.

 

The Scrapbook agrees. This is, indeed, a perfectly "creative" approach to hard news wire-copy. Undisguised bias! Why didn't somebody think of that before?

Perils of Weekly Journalism

Time magazine columnist Joe Klein, an optional-lead kind of guy if ever there was one, has spent the past couple years of his previously distinguished career muttering dark imprecations against the "neoconservative fantasy" that is Bush administration foreign policy. Nowadays he often sounds like Pat Buchanan, actually: Everything the president has already done overseas is awful (or has come out okay not because of but despite Bush's efforts). And everything the president is about to do overseas is even worse.

Indeed, so confident has Klein become in his anti-Bush religion that he now seems prepared to exalt its peculiar truths even over those most sacred teachings of the Periodical Gods. The Scrapbook is a humbler wretch, so much so that he trembles merely to mention the eternal commandment he has in mind. Nevertheless, here goes: Thou shalt not write thy column "into the news," sayeth the Lord. Or, translated into the vulgate: Whatever you do, don't publish a piece on Sunday that's gonna stay out on the newsstands until next Saturday if there's a pretty good chance something will happen tomorrow that makes you look like an absolute jackass.

But, forsooth! Brother Joseph has given himself up to sin, most recently in a Time essay posted on that magazine's website March 13. We join said essay just as Mr. Klein is dumping on the president for having announced, "the American people are on your side. The momentum of freedom is on your side, and freedom will prevail in Lebanon."

 

As the president delivered these remarks, however, the people of Lebanon had a message for him: half a million of them--far more than had attended any pro-democracy rally--had been gathered in the streets of Beirut by the terrorist-military-civic group Hezbollah. . . . In fact, a month after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, the Lebanese anti-Syrian opposition is in disarray. . . . And so the Bush administration finds its hopes for democracy in Lebanon almost completely dependent on the good faith of Hezbollah . . . a group traditionally more interested in lobbing Katyusha rockets into Israel than in organizing municipal elections.

 

Oops.

For a somewhat more traditional, straight-lead account of the situation in Lebanon, let's turn to CNN's Anderson Cooper, reporting live from Beirut barely 24 hours after Joe Klein's latest little hissy fit was sent around the globe. It seems that the largest popular demonstration in the modern history of the Middle East is just wrapping up there:

 

Cooper: It was a day to remember in once-battered Beirut. Martyrs' Square, a killing zone in the civil war, was awash with flags and hopes for freedom. Walking in the swirling sea of protesters, it was easy to forget where you were, forget this is a country, a region where speaking out could get you killed.

Crowd: Syria out! Syria out!

Cooper: Unlike many places in the Middle East, people want to be on camera here. . . . It's a new-found freedom and they want to make the most of it. It wasn't just the assassination of the former prime minister, Hariri, which caused these demonstrations. That was the catalyst. But everyone here will tell you they watched the elections in Iraq, they watched the elections in Afghanistan, and they said to themselves and to each other, why can't we have that here?

Unidentified male: God bless George Bush! God bless USA!

Unidentified male: I love the people of America one by one!

Unidentified male: We love USA!

 

These people must not have read Joe Klein.

Guy Stuff

An international team of 250 scientists, conducting research first reported last Thursday in the British journal Nature, has completed a full map of the X or "female" chromosome which helps determine sex in human beings. The researchers found much greater genetic variation between the sexes than they had expected. All told, as the Los Angeles Times described the team's conclusions, "men and women may differ by as much as 2 percent of their entire genetic inheritance, greater than the hereditary gap between humankind and its closest relative--the chimpanzee." Huntington Willard of Duke University, one of the key researchers participating in this latest effort, told the Chicago Tribune that by now "any of us over the age of two realizes there are plenty of differences between males and females that are characteristic of the two sexes."

Alas, however, scientists have yet to discover an explanation for the inability of Harvard University faculty members to discuss this subject like grownups.

[EagleUSA]

What -- you mean the MSM modifies the news to suit an agenda, er, I mean, make it more acceptable and understandable to certain groups of people.....

Food for the braindead....

[TexanToTheCore]

"men and women may differ by as much as 2 percent of their entire genetic inheritance, greater than the hereditary gap between humankind and its closest relative--the chimpanzee"

Perhaps women really are from Venus.....