"Middle East fighting rivits attention locally" screams the headline on the front page of the local paper. After suffering a brief bout of confusion in which I envisioned a football team called the Middle East Fighting Rivits, I came up with just a few questions for the editor:
1. Is the copyeditor on vacation or does someone down there actually think there's a verb spelled "rivits"?
2. Disregarding the spelling error, did anyone over there attempt to mentally envision the action described in "fighting rivets attention"? Does anyone down there actually know what a rivet is?
3. Is this news? Yes, I know that the fighting in the Middle East is news, but when you ask a random group of non-expert local residents what they think of the news, what you get is at best meta-news and at worst drivel.
4. Why is this on the front page? The article eschews facts in favor of opinion and commentary; surely such a piece belongs on an opinion page rather than on page one.
Maybe I'm just being picky. I ought to focus on what the article does well and ignore the rest--but unfortunately, it's hard to do that when my attention is riveted to "rivits."
No comments:
Post a Comment