On spiking the football

EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Special Operations forces on the ground in Iraq were following a convoy carrying Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani when it was struck by an American drone last week, killing Soleimani and nine others, Fox News has learned.

The soldiers following Soleimani's convoy as it left Baghdad International Airport were about a half-mile behind when it was hit by a missile fired from a Reaper drone. They were on the scene within a minute or two and performed a so-called "bomb damage assessment," taking pictures of the scene and confirming that the drone had picked out the right car -- and that Soleimani was no more.

Fox News has obtained photos of the aftermath of the Jan. 3 drone strike from a U.S. government source. Some of the images -- which Fox News will not show -- include graphic, close-up views of Soleimani's body, which is grossly disfigured and missing limbs. Another photo shows Soleimani's body burning next to the car in which he was riding.

You can click through to the ones Fox does show if you'd like. But return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when the official approach to killing an International Terrorist was ... how's that again, Fair 'n' Balanced Network?

President Obama has made a "categorical" decision not to release any photos of Usama bin Laden's  body, according to the White House, citing concern that doing so could inflame sentiment against Americans. 

... The president first revealed his decision during an interview with CBS News' "60 Minutes." Reading an excerpt from the interview, Carney said the president cautioned that such images could be used to incite violence or as a propaganda tool.

"We don't trot out this stuff as trophies. ... We don't need to spike the football," Obama said, according to Carney.

There is, of course, precedent for not prancing around with images of enemy war dead. One, it's tended to go badly since roughly the Iliad or so. Two, more or less what Clement Attlee said in 1946, when asked in Parliament about whether he favored releasing photos of the Nazis executed at Nuremberg: No, but thanks for asking. Indeed, the Allied Control Commission refused to release the Nuremberg photos in London, citing British public opinion. (They were released to the press of other Allied nations in Berlin; the World's Greatest Newspaper ran them as a backpage spread.) Here's some of what FM 6-27, "The commander's handbook on the law of land warfare," has to say on the topic:

But the football-spiking thing was not the sort of idea that Fox would just let go of, especially when those hard-hitting Internet ads started to show up in Obama's reelection year:

JOHN ROBERTS, ANCHOR: We're back with our panel. We want to talk campaign 2012. In this web video that is creating an awful lot of buzz, it's from Veterans for a Strong America accusing President Obama of spiking the football over Usama bin Laden. Let's take a look.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I can report I directed Leon Panetta...I was briefed...I met repeatedly...I determined at my direction. I called President Zardari...I as commander in chief.

And, lest you need reminding about what an intellectual sleaze Charles Krauthammer was:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: This is a very strong ad. And unlike the one against John Kerry, it's not about one story or what happened against another story. This ad simply shows the words Obama has used himself. So the facts are not in dispute. And it hits at several levels. It isn't just that Obama has managed to turn a positive, something he did well, into a negative by attacking, using it as a partisan weapon which diminishes him also but diminishes the solemnity of the event that was national event and he appropriated it for himself. It's the narcissism. And that is the deeper issue here, how they quote Obama again and again using the first person pronoun in his announcement of the event. It's all about me, "I commander in chief", "I ordered", "I did this." What about the guys out there who did it and who risked their lives?

I suppose it's time to see how a Real President comports himself. Here, he's discussing the imminent threat thing with Laura Ingraham on Fox:

Ingraham: Don't the American people have the right to know what specifically was targeted without revealing methods and sources?

Trump: Well, I don't think so, but we will tell you that probably it was going to be the embassy in Baghdad. You saw that happening. You saw with all of the men, very few women, circling it and circling it very strongly and very viciously, knocking out windows and trying to get and they were close to getting in, and I called out the military. They said we'll have it there tomorrow. I said, nope, you'll have it there today. We're not going to have another Benghazi on our hands. And we did a really amazing job. I get no credit for it, but we never get credit for anything, and that's OK. In the meantime, we have the greatest economy we've ever had, a lot of other things.

... Ingraham: Did they have large scale attacks planned for other embassies? And if those were planned, why can't we reveal that to the American people. Wouldn't that help your case?

Trump: I can reveal that I believe it would have been four embassies. And I think that probably Baghdad already started. They were really amazed that we came in with that kind of a force. We came in with very powerful force and drove them out. That ended almost immediately. But Baghdad certainly would've been the lead. But I think it would've been four embassies that had been military bases -- could've been a lot of other things too, but it was imminent. And then all of a sudden he was gone.

... Ingraham: Are you worried that the Democrats can't be trusted with classified information? Because that's kind of what it sounded like when Pence gave that interview and talked about sources and methods the other day.

Trump: I am worried about it, certainly. I am worried about it. Can you imagine? Here we are, split-second timing, executed -- like nobody's seen in many, many years -- on Soleimani? Can you imagine they want us to call out and speak to crooked corrupt politician Adam Schiff? Oh, Adam, we have somebody that we've been trying to get for a long time. We have a shot at him right now. Could we meet so that we can get your approval, Adam Schiff? And he'd say, well, let's do it in a couple of days. Oh, OK, let's wait a couple -- it doesn't work that way, number one. Number two, they leak. Anything we give will be leaked immediately. You'll see breaking news, we're about to attack in 25 minutes or do something. And by the way, I'm not somebody that wants to attack. I probably could've attacked 5 times, 10 times having to do with Iran. I've been very guarded because I don't want to do that. But we may have to do something. We have to be in a position where we can do it even from the negotiating standpoint. But hopefully it won't be necessary.

This one, though, may take the self-aggrandizement prize: 

Trump: And from our standpoint, let somebody else pay for it. Why are we always paying? We pay for everything. One thing, I moved my troops out of Syria -- on the border between Turkey and Syria. That turned out to be such a successful move, Laura. Look what happened. Now they protect their own -- they've been fighting over that border for 1,000 years. Why should we do it? And then they say he left troops in Syria. You know what I did? I left troops to take the oil. I took the oil. The only troops I have are taking the oil. They're protecting the oil. I took over ...
Even Laura Ingraham has had enough at this point:

Ingraham: They're protecting the facility.

Trump: I don't know. Maybe we should take it, but we have the oil. Right now, the United States has the oil. So they say he left troops in Syria. No. I got rid of all of them other than we're protecting the oil. We have the oil.

It'll be interesting to see how the rest of the media follow up.

Happy birthday, A.J. Liebling

You could almost set your watch by these guys. Barely a day after a minor decision at the opinion pages of a West Coast paper caught the ire of the wackosphere, it's a top story at the Fair 'n' Balanced homepage! Since it's presented in the form of real news, let's have a look:

The Los Angeles Times is giving the cold shoulder to global warming skeptics.

Paul Thornton, editor of the paper’s letters section, recently wrote a letter of his own, stating flatly that he won't publish some letters from those skeptical of man’s role in our planet’s warming climate. In Thornton’s eyes, those people are often wrong -- and he doesn’t print obviously wrong statements.

Not to put words in Paul Thornton's mouth or anything,* but I'm not sure "often wrong" is the point here. I think his problem is with shrill, deranged and dishonest, but let's continue:
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Tabloid story of the (still-young) year

You should probably just go enjoy this one in its entirety, because perfect examples of the tabloid story -- the sourcing, the breathless shrillness, the painstaking ineptitude -- don't come around too often. But there are a few things to remark on.

For one, there are the claim quotes around "drunkard," an unusually British affectation for a paper that sports an American flag in the nameplate. Do not expect to win a libel suit on this one, kiddies. If you call the guy a "murderer," you've called him a murderer. (Likewise the online hed, 'Boozed-up' plane passenger duct-taped to his seat to stop rampage: sources; the quotes wouldn't save you even if they represented a real quote.)

While we're on the subject of holes you're asking your lawyer to dig you out of? "Drunkard" doesn't mean "somebody who's drunk." Look it up.

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This should be embarrassing

When a story has gotten this far along the assembly line, there's not much chance a lone copy editor is going to derail it just by pointing out that it's amateurish, irrelevant, ineptly executed and clueless under almost any known approach to journalism ethics. But it would be nice to know that someone had tried.

To sum it up for out-of-towners: There's been an arrest (so far not accompanied by any charges) in a series of rapes in northeast Detroit. That's an important development, and although it's the sort of important development that tends to be handed to news outlets on a silver platter, it's distinctly real news that affects real people. We can even give the police chief credit for summing things up: "What I don’t want lost in all of this is there are seven victims whose lives will never be the same."

Good. I don't want that lost either. But I don't see why it has to entail the Junior G-Man turn we get in print:
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Tyranny of the stylebook

This looks like a bad case of the "false title" rule overruling common sense (and, to be direct about it, ignoring not just the spirit of the law but its letter as well).

You NYT readers have no doubt noticed that the Times is exceedingly snooty about the distinction between "real" titles and what the trade knows as "occupational" titles. The Times's reading goes more or less like this: If you wouldn't address someone by the title you're assigning in print, you need to use "the" to make clear that it's not a Real Title. In real-life terms, since you wouldn't say "good morning, Shortstop Tinker," you can't call him "shortstop Joe Tinker" in text. It has to be "the shortstop Joe Tinker." Period, no exceptions. Check in when you've found a dozen examples from any weekday Times.

The trouble in this 1A example, of course, is that "Imam" is exactly not that kind of title. It'd be perfectly appropriate to say "Good morning, Imam Abdul Rauf" -- that's just a more formal version of what Nick Kristof is doing in the Week in Review section when he calls the guy "Imam Feisal." It's no different from calling your local man o' the cloth "Pastor Joe" or "Pastor Tinker": a register issue, not a grammar issue.

We need to set aside the Times's overstarched cluelessness for a moment, though. First, it's nice to see somebody call the guy "Abdul Rauf" on second reference; that's a fairly obvious point of style that -- you'd like to think -- the AP should have copped to a month or so back.

A name in that style is formed from the noun "abd," which for convenience's sake we'll render here as "servant," and a name or attribute of God. So, "ar-ra'uf" being "the gentle," a name like "Abdul Rauf" (someone else might prefer "Abdelrauf"; same thing*), meaning "servant of the Gentle," would be a single genitive compound wherever it occurs. Don't shiver at the weirdness** of it; if you ever saw "Abdul Jabbar" in a box score, you've already seen the same thing. Why the Times is the only -- best I can tell -- US news outfit with the sand to either ask the dude how he renders his last name or simply do it the obviously correct way until told otherwise is beyond me, but it's nice to see somebody paying attention to the details.***

More to the point is the profile itself. It's the sort of thing that didn't used to be all that unusual but amid the general plunge of journalism toward the nether pits is becoming rare. And it makes stunningly clear that that this guy -- this scary-named Ayrab who somehow fails to leap at every chance to call Hamas a gang of terrorist thugs, who dares to entertain the idea that there might be some relationship between state policy**** and substate violence -- is one Kumbaya-singing cheeseball pussycat. He could hardly tie the shoes of the conniving mastermind of evil you've been reading about these last few weeks in the mainstream press.

If there's a point to take away from all this, it's that journalists in the main risk abdicating their responsibility here. The biggest mistake we -- that's "we," as in a group of notional professionals who generally agree on a set of standards that stuff has to meet to qualify as "journalism" -- could mistake is allowing this remarkably overblown non-issue into the public sphere on the terms set by the paymasters of the hard right. The Times is not the "left" side of this debate. For all the Times's manifest failings, which I'm as happy to catalog as anyone, it's the professional side. The other side is the camp of lying, fearmongering and naked race-baiting. That's the side of Fox News and its friends. They can, and should, be the objects of relentless public ridicule. Journalists are no more obliged to take Fox at face value than they would be to take the Klan at face value. There's really not much difference.

* Gentle Readers who wish to knock themselves out on the topics of sun-letter elision and pausal vs. continued speech (yo! Cowan!) may go ahead. I'm still hoping to get some revisions out tonight.
** I used to work with an especially annoying rimrat who was a preacher in her spare time. She was perpetually amazed at the apparent irony of terrorists named Muhammad. Since she covered sports on the occasional weekend shift, we finally asked her if she was equally weirded out by shortstops named Jesus. I'm not sure the idea really sank in, but it did shut her up for a day or two.
*** Yes, that means that for all its other virtues, Frank Rich's column is wrong in using "Rauf" on second reference. Some editor should have corrected him. Imagine how much real editing could be done if people paid attention to actual grammar -- the Arabic genitive compound being such -- rather than bizarre fabrications from the Siegal era.
**** Because we hear the Pearl Harbor analogy so often these days, it's worth mentioning here. Would anyone out there really like to contend that there was no connection whatsofreakingever between US policy in 1941 and Japan's decision to go with the Pearl Harbor attack? If so, I'd like to suggest that you're a babbling loony.

Don't do this

Here's one of those annoying journalism habits that I had thought was gone with the -- I don't know, gone with the flying-verb hed* or something. How is the Daily Herald of "suburban Chicago" going to come up with a 1A story about the Blago case? Hey, let's ask some psychologists for a little armchair analysis!

Ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich's denial that anything was wrong, selling himself to reality shows, even his always-perfect hair have caused some to question his state of mind. (How do you tell Fox from real journalism? Well, when it comes to "some" ledes, you don't! But seriously -- this is a benchmark for 1A stories? Big hair makes you a nutcase?)

But now that Blagojevich's federal corruption trial reveals his interest in running for president, his jealousy of others, and his struggle to get money while he and his wife spent $400,000 on clothes over six years, some psychologists say they believe they can put a name to his mental status. (Other than the "mental status" you have to have before running for statewide office anyway?)

Specifically, two prominent Chicago psychologists said Blagojevich displays symptoms of a condition officially known as narcissistic personality disorder. (How do you mean "prominent"? Do they sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" at the seventh-inning stretch? Or were they on the heavily attended citywide panel discussion on personality disorders? Or were they ...)

Dr. Daniela Schreier, a forensic psychologist at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, said it's impossible to make a clinical diagnosis without a personal evaluation, which she has not done. (Since she's -- how do we put this? -- "right," do you suppose this would be a good time to kill the story?) But, she said, Blagojevich definitely has traits of the condition. (How long did it take for her to come up with this diagnosis? Surely the reporter wouldn't have ... I mean, surely a reporter wouldn't actually call up a prominent psychologist and plant the seed of a suggested malady? Wouldn't that require shopping around for just the right psychologists?

Scott Ambers, a Chicago psychologist, said Blagojevich appears to "hit the jackpot" in meeting the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder.

If by "just right" you mean "will reliably use colorful figures of speech on demand," it looks that way.
Owing to selection bias, we don't know what "psychologists" -- even prominent Chicago ones -- think about the propriety of this. I'd like to know how many disagreed with the reporter, how many pointed out the ethical issues of doing jackleg diagnosis based on fragmentary media reports, and how many hung up on the reporter outright.** (Considering how nice "quoted as an expert source by ..." looks on the vitae, we should all plan to buy the dissidents a beer next time we see them.) And I don't know of any specific prohibitions in the assorted bits of journalism canon against enticing other professionals to bend their own ethics guidelines.

I don't think we even have to go there, because what we have here is simply crap journalism, raw and fragrant. It's a newspaper pretending to be a daytime TV show and not realizing that it's singularly lacking in noise, lights, motion and morons -- though I'm pretty close to conceding that last point.

I'm sorry for the rimrat who had to write the hed, because it's a brutal count.*** But it's nice to think, if only for a moment, that the rimrat turned to the slot and said "The specs aren't the problem. I can't write a hed because the story sucks."

* Quiz 8 in ax fest!

** It's more than possible that, having found two sources, the reporter stopped right there. (Hey, if two sources was good enough for Woodward and Bernstein ...)
*** BLAGO NUTS, SHRINKS OPINE. Happy now? 

Today's Fox quiz

No peeking, Fox fans!

1) Which of these two stories has a Fox creditline and which is taken from the AP?
2) Which of these stories has comments enabled?

Feel free to post answers in comments. Remember, this could be on the final.

Time and a place

As long as we're sharing our strange beliefs here, I'll note that in general, I'm not terribly bothered by unnamed sources -- or at least that as source qualities go, I'm less bothered by anonymity than by dishonesty, malice or stupidity. With that out of the way, though, it's worth noting that some cases of naming are more important than others. Prosecutions, for example. Here's why:

A former contract worker for the CIA pleaded guilty Tuesday in Detroit to fabricating background checks of federal employees and potential employees. The suspected motive: laziness and greed.

Service journalism at its best! You didn't even know you needed a link to backgroundcheckgateway.com, did you? But there's something bigger to worry about here:

Two sources familiar with the case said Tuesday that Kerry Gerdes, 26, of Royal Oak simply avoided conducting the interviews as a fast track to getting paid.

Uh, no. If you're going to talk about the defendant's motives, you stand up and do it in an open court or you shut up. This is where the whole fair-trial thing is actually a complement to the whole free-press thing. Trials aren't open just so you can write down lots of lurid details and run big screaming heds with near-complete protection from libel claims. They're open so one side (usually the one with the power and resources; guess which?) doesn't get to make blind claims about the other.

..."The defendant was entrusted by the United States to conduct background investigations of applicants to sensitive positions," U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg said. "The false reports submitted by Gerdes were a betrayal of the trust placed in her."

Does he just talk like a press release, or are we, erm, quoting his press release? No law against that, but it doesn't make much of a case for the independence of your reporting.

... Sources said she was paid per background check and simply didn't do the required work as a way to quickly move on to the next paycheck.

At the very least, tell me why these sources are credible enough to quote (and whether they're the same "two sources" you mentioned earlier). Is this assertion part of the record? If not, what's it doing in the plea story?

... Her attorney, Richard Helfrick of the Federal Defender's Office, did not return phone calls Tuesday.

So at this point, is it fair to conclude that we've covered a key moment in a fairly prominent case (in traditional terms, I'd call the story a second-front offlede) without bothering to attend it? That's too bad. Showing up in court is often a good way of finding out stuff that the prosecutor's office doesn't put in press releases -- or of actually finding the defendant's lawyer, should you want to compare his take with what "sources" say. That used to be a fairly good way of distinguishing journalism from PR.

Granted, the Freep has too few people covering too much frontage. (Gannett managers aren't the only ones who can count bylines.) And given their say, I expect some -- maybe most -- of them would rather cover the story from the courtroom than by phone and fax. Just a reminder that when we lose the routines of journalism, we're losing a lot of stuff that's less prominent, but not less important, than the big FOIA fights.

Photos and reality: Wheaties test

Comes a request for discussion of the photo at right -- specifically, whether it's appropriate to run pictures of dead dogs on the front. It's always a little tricky to generalize rules from single cases, so (being an agenda-setting sort) I'll tell you a little of what I think about before telling you what I think.

When someone asks what I think about photos of dead animals on 1A, I tend to start with: What kind of animals, and how did they get that way? I don't mean that to be dismissive; I think it's a way of suggesting that most of us would put different photos at different places on the continuum. If there's a chemical spill upstream from My Little Town and the photo is of dead fish crowding the intakes at the water treatment plant, no problem. Dead deer on the first day of the season? I wouldn't front it, but it's pretty easy to imagine cases where that's what the audience would expect. Bear shot dead after running wild up and down Main Street at the peak of back-to-school days? Sure. Dead kitty tortured by local adolescents? Nope.

See a couple of continuums operating there? Mammals are more proximate than fish, and pets more proximate than wild animals. Present danger is bigger than past danger, and public danger bigger than small-scale danger. Ritual news and surprise news raise different sorts of questions. And all those things more or less point to a bigger question: What's the photo saying?

That's a bit of a stumbling block, I think, because decision-makers are inclined to start from the presumption that photos are true, rather than the presumption that photos are highly selective representations of brief moments of reality. Just for the heck of it, here are two AP photos from a press conference by the Rutgers basketball team back during the Don Imus scandal. Is one of them truer than the other? If so, which?

My call (which, I will remind you, is easily worth the price of your subscription) is that they're true about different things. When you choose between them, you're making a discursive choice rather than an "objective" one. Nothing wrong with that, unless you're in the habit of mistaking your truth for the truth.

We're not spending much time on what a mediocre photo is the one that adorns the Venice front, or what a genuinely awful story* it accompanies. I'm not sure those concerns make that much difference -- at least, technical quality itself shouldn't make you change your mind about the ethics of photo play. But the quality issues do speak to a certain incoherence, which goes to the problem above. I really don't know what I'm supposed to be seeing. The story's almost all blotter, no context. If there's some higher good to be served by the photo, no one's making a case for it. "We've got a picture of dead dogs" is a statement of fact; it's not an explanation of what the picture is, and it's not a justification for running it. If I'm going to yank people's chains over breakfast, I'd like to have a stronger reason.

A long time back, I had one of those occasional copydesk-vs.-assigning-desk arguments with a great good friend of many years' standing. His conclusion:** "You get paid to keep stuff out of the paper; I get paid to put stuff in the paper." I tend to put it differently: I get paid -- or did, back in those days -- to make sure that everything going into the paper has a reason. So I'm not really trying to argue the dogs off the front page. I'm suggesting they had no reason to be there in the first place.

Opposing views, as always, are welcome.

* Look, spellcheck isn't a very smart tool, but at least it'll tell you that the cop's name is spelled two different ways.
** Constructed from memory; kids, don't try this at home.

But hey, that would be going into details

Well, this is interesting:

Below are excerpts of e-mails, obtained by The State newspaper in December, between Gov. Mark Sanford's personal e-mail account and Maria, a woman in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Let's see. Sumer is no longer icumen in, it is ysitting on the deck ydrinking our Beere. December would be, um, six months ago? So this is a story now ... why?

Oh. Because the governor of Carolina the Lesser hasn't just been out of pocket,* he's been yholden press conferences to explain that he was actually violating old No. 7, rather than innocently yhiking the Appalachian Trail!

Sanford's office Wednesday did not dispute the authenticity of the emails.

Does that mean Wednesday was the first day we asked the governor's office about the e-mails? In that case, we're into some really interesting territory, and not just the tracts of land the governor refers to in the e-mails. That would suggest** that the state capital daily has known for six months that Gov. Sanford was having it off with his Argentine friend and didn't do anything about it.

Which is potentially ... remarkably mature for an American newspaper, isn't it?*** It knew something scandalous, salacious and vastly entertaining but decided not to print it, on grounds that a consensual frolic or eight between adults might imply that the governor is a loathsome toad but doesn't have a thing to do with public policy and governance?

That'd be a brave and difficult call, particularly in an era in which technology makes it unlikely that your decision would have any long-term impact on what people know and when. It isn't unprecedented. One of the Observer's claims to fame back in its Pulitzer days was that it knew about Jim Bakker's sexual dalliance long before it broke its PTL stories but didn't run anything -- it was interested in fraud, which is a crime, rather than sex, which isn't. If that's how The State made The Decision, it's earned a respectful hearing and probably some applause, though it probably owes its readers an explanation along the way.

That being the case, though, is there some point in running the e-mails today? (Or to be more precise, promising "the full e-mail exchange" tomorrow?) Sanford has made clear that he's a weasel; is there a point in running

I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night’s light - but hey, that would be going into sexual details.

... other than to turn your back on any ethical process that led you to sit on the stories for six months in the first place?

I don't mean to suggest that there's an easy answer, or a conclusive answer, to the questions this story raises. If "journalism ethics" was easy, we wouldn't have much of a case for offering three-hour courses in it. But I do think The State ought to get off The Fence. Either stick with the hard call you made or admit that you're going to fold at the first chance to say "two magnificent parts of yourself."

What do you say, gentle readers? Should the governor's steamy prose have been a story six months ago, or should it still be a not-story today? Thoughts and arguments are welcome.****

* Producing what might be the stupidest sidebar in the history of the Associated Press, which is going some.
** The State seems to have a bad case of The Coys about this. A timeline of what-did-they-know-and-when-did-they-know it would be a lot more useful than a breathless account of the past few days.
*** As well as giving the lie to the likes of Sean Hannity, which is always a bonus even if it isn't much of a challenge.
**** We would be remiss not to point out the truly inept construction of this paragraph:
McClatchy special correspondent Angeles Mase visited the 14-story apartment building in Buenos Aires Wednesday where the woman lives, according to the emails, which included her address. The woman at the address answered to the name in the emails and, at first, agreed to speak to a visitor, but she declined after the visitor identified herself as a reporter.
Have at it, diagramming fans

No, but thanks for asking

What's more irresponsible than alleged legal professionals who speculate about the outcome of trials that haven't happened yet? Newspapers that call 'em up and offer free promotional space to do so!

This is proclaimed an ORLANDO SENTINEL EXCLUSIVE, and there seems to be good reason for it:

Since Casey Anthony became the prime suspect in the disappearance — and eventual death — of her daughter Caylee Marie, prosecutors have released thousands of pages of evidence in their case against her.

But does the case, with its countless morsels of evidence, truly link the 22-year-old Orange County mother to Caylee Anthony's remains?

The Orlando Sentinel asked a handful of legal experts about some of the evidence released so far. They predict a difficult case for both sides.

It's "exclusive" because -- oh, hell. That's why we run the horse race! We actually have a "legal system," which has a "mechanism" for determining whether cases link people to stuff. It's called a "trial." Not a "1A centerpiece."

Lawyers are responsible for their own ethical standards. We're responsible for ours. The story shouldn't have been written, it shouldn't have been fronted, and -- we're getting into very-small-victory territory for copy editors here, but it's better than nothing -- it shouldn't have been phrased as a question that assumes its own answer. And one more thing: Don't call grownups by their first names in heds.

Why we have the rule

A Charlotte businessman was murdered Friday morning on Independence Boulevard, the victim of an apparent robbery.

The basic rule: It's a murder when a jury says it's a murder. Until then, it's a "killing" (a homicide, if all the cops on that shift are monolingual in Latin) or -- nice blanket term -- a "death." Murder is a legal term for a particular kind of killing. Until that determination is made, you run a risk (ranging from smaller to larger, but never nonexistent) of being wrong when you decide to narrow down the broad category of homicide to the kind you think sounds good in a lede.

Arguments for the freewheeling use of "murder" come in two basic flavors:
1) Murder sounds more dramatic than "killing" or "death"! Funny, most people manage to sustain a reasonable level of interest when "found dead of a gunshot wound" occurs in their neighborhood or parking deck. How badly do you want to write a correction?
2) But [star columnist's name here] gets paid to call 'em like he sees 'em! Well, opinion is free, facts are sacred; how's it going with that correction?

Does it seem as if we're harping too much on that tiny risk of being wrong? Let's see:
A Charlotte man shot to death Friday morning in the Independence Towers parking lot was not the victim of a robbery but of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police now say.

"Police now say" is a little disingenuous. In the first story, the only elements attributed to the cops were "found lying in the parking lot" and "had been shot sometime around 9:35 a.m." Even the paper's "news partner" wrote "was shot to death Friday morning* during an apparent robbery, police said." (Don't you love the passive voice?)

There's more to this than one overeager blunder, though. Let's shift gears for a second and look at a story discussed on the editor's blog:

Q:You usually allow reader comments for stories posted on your Web site. But that's not the case with the coverage of the Skipper Beck prostitution story. Was this an oversight, or deliberate decision not to let readers weigh in?
A: We really like for readers to weigh in on the stories we post. But some topics consistently attract lewd, obscene or otherwise inappropriate comments. So, when such topics surface, we are faced with either constantly monitoring the comments or simply skipping the commenting function on a particular story. Prostitution, as you might imagine, is one of those topics. In the case of Skipper Beck, it quickly became clear that a few readers were determined to post offensive remarks.

Mr. Beck, if you're scoring along at home, runs a Mercedes dealership. You can see why, despite the paper's fascination with all the fallout from this high-end prostitution ring thing, you'd want to disable comments. What sort of comments showed up on the purported Independence Boulevard murder?

I am working as hard as I can to get my family back to the west coast. With the make up of this city and what I see comming down. I just do not want to live in the south anymore !

We all know these guns are illegal, being used by gun toting felons, the Drug Dealers are selling them with the Drugs Many Imported underground from Mexico, they are noted for their drug /weapon imports and human trafficking.

That one was from a poster whose earlier comment was deleted as "abusive." I don't know what that category covers, but here are a few comments I'd nominate from the TV station's story:

the media could help by posting descriptions of these animals. ever heard of america's most wanted? the liberal media is more interested in trying to hide the fact that there is an epidemic of black crime, expecially black against white crime, in charlotte. they care more about appearing as good little knee jerk lock step liberals than in helping the law abiding people of charlotte.

these creatures have taken over our streets. our justice system is a joke. if something does not change soon, we are headed for total anarchy. when that happens, the US will surely crumble. when and if they catch this creature, i wonder what race it will be? i think we already know the answer. these types of creatures need to be removed from our society. sounds barbaric? it is! and it is the only option we have if we want to take back our country.

Not to be blunt, but if you haven't noticed yet that stories about violent crime in Charlotte inevitably attract comment from the sort of bottom-feeding droolers who seem "determined to post offensive remarks" like these, you haven't been paying attention -- or, at least, you haven't been paying attention to stories that aren't about rich white guys who sell Benzes. Does it take a blunder on the cop beat to bring home the painfully obvious point that the comment feature ought to be disabled on all news stories, permanently, without exceptions?

It's clear that the Independence death story isn't racist in intent; it isn't the paper's fault that it has a bunch of unreconstructed swine among its readers. But it's racist in result, particularly in context of the prostitution story, and that's a pretty good argument for (a) professional caution in cop reporting and (b) an immediate end to the idea that reader comments are worth adding to news coverage.

* The hed does say "murdered"; let's not give the TV folks too much credit.

Editor of the week

Everyone who laces up the editing cleats and takes to the field has to deal, at some point, with a complaining member of the audience. Sometimes it's a malicious complainer. Sometimes it's a very stupid complainer. Sometimes it's a powerful complainer. Sometimes it's all three.

We can't all have the presence to respond with "Cancel your own damn subscription." We can't all be like an excellent colleague from several newspapers back who violated the Cooperative Principle all over a caller one night on the sports desk:
Drunk in bar: Whaz the score of the Carolina game?
Sports desker: 24-22 (begins to hang up)
Drunk in bar: Wait. Uh. Who won?
Sports desker: 24 (finishes hanging up)

But we'd probably all count it a good day if we could respond to a critic in detail, pointing at the documentation while invoking Higher Journalistic Principle and never -- no matter how enticingly the Evil One whispers -- bringing up the critic's mama and the entire 18th Airborne Corps in the same sentence. Please join your editors here, then, in honoring our first Editor of the Week recipient, Pat Dougherty of the Anchorage Daily News.

Mr. Dougherty has a particularly vexing problem, When he writes back to a particular (mendacious, powerful, etc.) critic to request details of a complaint and offer a few in response, he gets silence -- until he finds the critic has used a preexisting bully pulpit to call him and his crew a bunch of hacks. If you haven't figured out yet who his antagonist is, it's someone who has (a) access to the governor's press office and (b) the unmitigated gall to play poor-pitiful-me with phrases like "I acknowledge that you own the ink." Also. Getting the picture yet? And she has a journalism degree also. So he -- quite responsibly, in my view -- responds by putting the e-mail exchange into the record, along with follow-ups as needed.

I had been sort of hoping Sarah Palin would just go away, and she sort of did. But she seems intent on proving herself just as shamelessly dishonest outside the spotlight as she was during her few bizarre weeks in it. For staying on topic, taking we-report-you-decide seriously, and resolutely refusing to tee off on the governor despite mortal temptation, Pat Dougherty is Editor of the Week. Please buy him a beer if you see him.

The miracle of convergence

Bad news, newspaper folks: When you let TV stations pick your frontpage stories, you're letting TV stations set your standards for news and news practice. Sure you want to go down that road?

A Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools teacher faces firing for posting derogatory comments about students on Facebook, while four others have been disciplined for posts involving “poor judgment and bad taste,” spokeswoman Nora Carr said Tuesday.

Stop press! And how did this alarming situation come about?

WCNC, the Observer's news partner, turned up questionable pages on the social networking site by searching for people who identified themselves as CMS employees.

Oops. Don't tell me it's Sweeps Month again. Let's see if we can get this straight: TV station, eyes on the ratings, decides to go trolling in Facebook for Teachers Behaving Badly. And then it ...

Reporter Jeff Campbell of WCNC said he showed district officials pages involving seven CMS teachers.

Oh, great.

This wouldn't go anywhere as a privacy case, I suspect, because Facebook isn't private; post a picture of yourself summoning Great Cthulhu with the Nekkid Square Dance and you're going to have a hard time claiming it was a secret. But that doesn't mean our intrepid reporter is in the clear. He didn't create the pictures or the postings, but he created the offense -- the harm they purportedly cause. Getting drunk and striking racy poses with your teacher pals after work isn't inherently harmful, in the way that taking bribes or sleeping with your minor students create harm just by happening. It's only harmful when the pictures go public (if then). This story strikes me as the moral equivalent of hanging out at the bar where teachers drink, getting a few photos of teachers nose-down and shopping the results to the school board: Look What Our "Role" "Models" Are Up To Now!

TV stations do this stuff because -- well, because they're TV stations. A couple times a year, they get very directly rewarded for having lots of eyes on screen, so it pays them to have really low to nonexistent journalistic standards during those times. Why newspapers go along is a mystery. If anyone wants to argue the opposing case, please feel free, but I don't see the newspaper getting much out of this except sleaze without the gratification of originality.