The Fading Power of the Fourth Estate (Lindbergh's Baby Division)

JOURNALISM-LAND, The Universe--We had a disturbing thought the other day as we ruminated upon the crumbling newsprint industry. (We often spend, which is to say waste, our increasingly foreshortened time on earth ruminating about such things. Better that, however, than ruminating about, say, the paralyzing horror of an incipient Sarah Palin presidential run, don't you think?)
   There are plenty of reasons to despair about the imminent disappearance of newspapers and magazines. Most all of them have been written about in The Columbia Journalism Review. 
   Except one. 
   What, we wonder, will kidnappers and bank robbers do? How will they construct ransom or robbery notes without newsprint letters to snip from magazines and paste onto paper? 
   Is it possible that, along with the print one, the entire kidnapping and bank robbery industries will disintegrate too? In this sense, is it a societal blessing that, say, USA Today will one day no longer exist? 
   We do not know, but we suspect it can't be long before the Columbia Journalism Review tackles the issue. We can't wait. 

Crime of the Century (Spokes Person Division)

HONOLULU, Hawaii--"A 20-year-old man who tried to rob a man at a Kalihi bus stop Saturday night was arrested riding a stolen bicycle, police said." 
   This mystifying lede appeared in the first item of the "Police Blotter" in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser yesterday. The story went on: 
   "A 21-year-old man refused to give up his property at the bus stop at 9:45pm, police said.
   "He was then assaulted by the 20-year-old man, said police.
   "The suspect fled but was stopped a short distance away, riding a bicycle that had been reported stolen from a 57-year-old woman at a nearby store, police said.
   "The man resisted arrest but was subdued by officers, police said."
   The "Police Blotter" is endemic to newspapers in small communities. It calls to mind the sort of place in which everyone knows everyone and, when not on the job, the police chief sells used cars and trucks. 
   "Police Blotter" items often are written by the most junior member of a paper's staff. This person is learning, on the job, how to write in journalese, a language which resembles English not hardly a'tall. 
   For this bicycle-related item, the green reporter evidently wasn't aware that after noting in the first graf that police were the source of information ("... riding a stolen bicycle, police said"), he or she no longer needed do so. It is understood that all following facts derive from the same source unless otherwise indicated. 
   Still, our earnest correspondent showed a bit of flair in the third sentence. After twice writing "police said," he/she stepped out on a limb to write "said police." But reason swiftly reasserted itself. The nascent Hunter S. Thompson-esque rule-smashing newcomer once more prudently used the more conventional "police said." 
   That being said, we have nothing but good wishes for our intrepid if inexperienced reporter, even if he/she only exists in the fevered First of All imagination. To enter upon a career in journalism at this juncture in the Fourth Estate's enduring fadeout is brave beyond compare. Soon all journalists will be writing short pieces using sticks on leaves which they'll float down the river to the next village. But it will be called "Tweeting." 
   Oh, wait. Never mind.
   If it turns out our "inexperienced" reporter is in truth a broken-down alcoholic writing "Police Blotter" items in the final days of a long and storied career, well, so much the better. Good on ya, old-timer. You were there when dinosaurs roamed the land. First of All, a proud dinosaur, salutes you. 
   One last thing: robbing a man while riding a stolen bicycle? Seriously? 
   The burglars of yore would be aghast. 

The Fading Power of the Fourth Estate (Shoo-bee-doo-bee-doo Division)

SACRAMENTO, Ca.--It is not exactly, well, news that falling revenues and flagging readership continue to send the newspaper industry yet deeper into its current merciless tailspin.
   The decline has propelled newspaper executives to experiment with wide-ranging strategies to retain readers, including... well, lots of things, all of which we are simply too lazy to look up. 
   One paper evidently has decided to take an aggressively avant-garde approach: at the Sacramento Bee, reporters now write in Esperanto. 
   At least that's the conclusion to be drawn from reading the lede of a Dec. 24 Bee story reporting heavy snowfall in the Lake Tahoe area: 
   "Bing Crosby should come to Lake Tahoe. With a fresh heap of snow blanketing the landscape, the classic 'White Christmas' crooner couldn't have dreamed it any better. Nor could the area's tourist industry." 

   It would be cruel to unmask the miscreant who wrote this. It is the holiday season; we are determined to look kindly upon our brethren and sistern. For the sake of conversation let us call the Bee reporter by a randomly chosen name, one unassuming in the extreme, a name like, oh, we don't know, maybe something such as, let's say, Ed Fletcher (efletcher@sacbee.com).
   Mr. Fletcher may go unmasked; his lede shall not. It should be placed, like a severed head, atop a tall stick and paraded from town to village to burgh and back as a perfect example of exactly what not to do should you one day find yourself in the unenviable position of having to top a snow-related story with a catchy opening paragraph. 
   First off: Bing Crosby? Really? That rustling you hear is the sound of tens of thousands of Americans, ages sixteen to fortyish, scratching their heads as they murmur, "Bing who?" (Answer: the third most popular movie actor of all time, by box office numbers. Nevertheless...)

   But of course Mr. Fletcher name-checked Mr. Crosby. Recent studies have shown that the average age of newspaper readers is a hundred and sixty-five; the average age of reporters is roughly double that. 
   In recognition of these alarming facts, newspaper bigwigs have employed all kinds of tactics in the past decade to get those laptoppatizin', Tweetereezin', Facebookatatin', text-sendin' young folks to visit the ink-stained horse 'n buggy barn. Just last month, with an eye to creating an staff-wide understanding of the "youth demographic," New York Times editor Andrew Rosenthal ordered employees to be dosed with psilocybin and forced to wave glow sticks, suck on pacifiers and dance without respite for sixteen hours to drum 'n bass hits of the nineties. 

   But try as these media leaders might to hip things up, the Ed Fletchers of the world continue to fire bullets into their desperately dancing feet. When dreaming of a captivating snow-story lede, the best Ed Fletcher can do is to conjure Bing ("Who?") Crosby, a performer popular two and one-half centuries ago and best known for his mellifluous voice and his penchant--no offense to Crosby friends, family and fans across the globe--for beating his children.

   For an Ed Fletcher lede, however, a Bing Crosby reference is a mere warmup. What follows seems, on the face of it, a rather pleasant suggestion: that Mr. Crosby "should come to Lake Tahoe." Mr. Crosby used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area; no doubt he enjoyed many Tahoe trips. It is not difficult to believe that he would be game for another were it not for the fact that he is, in truth, entirely dead. 
   Crosbyesque Tahoe trips are therefore out of the question even were Mr. Crosby willing to strap skis to the maggot-chewed bones of his feet. 
   Mr. Fletcher, alas, soldiers on. Why should Mr. Crosby, dead or alive, come to Lake Tahoe? "With a fresh heap of snow blanketing the landscape, the classic 'White Christmas' crooner couldn't have dreamed it any better." 
   The way that sentence is constructed, if that sentence can be said to have been "constructed" (it cannot), suggests that Mr. Crosby himself has a fresh heap of snow blanketing some... landscape. The word "landscape" occasionally is used euphemistically to refer to, for example, parts of the body that would best be left unmentioned in polite society were there still such a thing as polite society. It immediately strikes First of All that there are most definitely "landscapes" of Mr. Crosby's badly decomposed body that we simply do not wish to picture (e.g., the anus). 
   Ahem, ahem. All right, children, gather round. Uncle First of All is now going to decode, phrase by phrase, the rest of that sentence for you:


   *"...the classic..." In addition to being a famous movie star, Mr. Crosby was an extremely popular singer. But when Mr. Fletcher writes that Mr. Crosby was a "classic" singer, he is not, kids, referring to what you think of as classic; that is to say classic rock, the music of the sixties that all but killed the careers of the Mr. Crosbys of the land. No, Mr. Fletcher means "classic" in a way that would make sense only to your average newspaper reader, age one hundred and sixty-five.

   *"...'White Christmas'..." A reference to a song, written by Irving Berlin in 1942, the lyrics of which set a nostalgic, elegiac tone: "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas/Just like the ones I used to know." Mr. Crosby sang the song in the movie musical Holiday Inn. (Executives at Paramount Pictures nixed his plan to perform it in blackface. They felt that audiences would simply be baffled by the sight of an African-American Bing Crosby singing, "And may all your Christmases be white.") The World War II-era song became a hit with soldiers overseas and their families at home. Mr. Crosby's version was so popular that a movie of the same name was made in 1954. It starred Mr. Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and a dancing gorilla. No, wait: that gorilla part is wrong. It was a dancing dwarf. 
   *"...crooner..." The nineteen forties and fifties singing style known as "crooning" was practiced by velvet-voiced male singers (Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Jack Jones, et cetera) whose job was to: a.) seduce chicks; x.) cut a compelling, if compellingly bland, fashion figure; and 12.) create music that was the aural equivalent of Valium--just the ticket for a generation rattled by World War II and by the thunder in the distance that would come to be known as rock 'n' roll. 
   *"...couldn't have dreamed it any better." See "White Christmas" lyrics, above. 


   Well. We have now spent roughly eleven hundred words dissecting--flaying?--poor Mr. Fletcher's no doubt rush-written lede. We can hardly be said to be carrying the Christmas spirit, white or otherwise. So we will leave well enough--and bad enough--alone, and wish you all a happy holiday season. May your  snow always arrive in fresh heaps and your landscapes always be, uh... well-showered?

---------------------------------
PS: We are painfully aware that our little blackface joke was in poor taste. We apologize. 
   Thank God Mr. Crosby habitually displayed more discernment than we do. He would never have stooped so low even as to joke about blackface, much less appear in it, because... 
   Wait a minute. 
   In the 1943 film Dixie, Mr. Crosby played a young Kentucky songwriter who tries to bust into the big time first in New Orleans and then in New York. At some point during this cinematic tale, Mr. Crosby appeared thus (ha-ha, ho-ho, we win): 

   
   
   
   
   

Crime of the Century (Crap Kerfuffle Divison)

NAPERVILLE, ILL., Sept. 19 - A woman who stepped in dog droppings outside her apartment Wednesday allegedly exacted swift and sure revenge upon a neighbor who owns the dropping-dropping dog. 
   Evidently, Susan M. Miller (left), who lives at the Brittany Springs apartment complex, on the 800 block of Beaumont Drive in the Chicago suburb of Naperville (pop: 144,560), has had it up to the top of her shoe with pooch-poo left lying around.
   The Naperville Sun ("Member of Sun-Times Media") reported Sept. 17 that Ms. Miller allegedly wiped cur ordure (dog shit) on the neighbor's porch, hurled it at her patio door, and filled bags with it and left them on the patio, to which she also relocated an apartment-complex sign urging residents to pick up their pets' waste. 
   These are creative, if rage-fueled, responses to the conundrum of festering dog logs. Granted, dog guardians - Ms. Miller is one - have the unenviable task of picking up their animals' ca-ca, often using bags that leave naught between hand and excreta except thin plastic. So some owners naturally balk, on occasion, at doing their duty when their dogs do their dooty.
  Still, what's more annoying than stepping in mutt faeces? Answer: neighbors who leave it around to be stepped in. 

   Alas, the law is the law. A Naperville police report cited by the Sun notes that Ms. Miller, who is forty-three, was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. She is free on bail. The unnamed neighbor apparently got off scot-free, but not to worry: God'll git 'er someday.
   A side note. Sun reporter Bill Bird couldn't help pecking out this lede: "Dog is man's best friend. Dog feces, not so much." 
   This sort of writing is causing readers to leave newspapers in droves, which accounts for the decline and fall of the Fourth Estate in America. 

   

Crime of the Century (Questionable Reporting Division)

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – A man who was discovered to have stood in for his twin brother in a May 4 court appearance was sentenced to six months in jail for “direct criminal attempt” – an offense a judge witnesses in a court.

  Marcus Mauceri, who is thirty, claimed under oath to be his brother, Matthew, and agreed to be fingerprinted to establish his identity.

  When the procedure revealed the truth, Marcus said he’d appeared to aid his brother, whom he knew would be late.

   This is all you need to know about this story, but it is nothing you’d know if you read the first seven paragraphs of May 5 story posted on tampabay.com, the Web site of the St. Petersburg Times:

  Something just didn’t seem right to attorney Jimmy Thomas when he talked to his client before his fraud trial Tuesday.

  The 30-year-old man did not seem to remember basic aspects of the case they had discussed.

  Thomas knew that his client, Matthew Mauceri, had a twin brother named Marcus.

  Thomas had represented both men in court, and the two often changed their appearances – sometimes [wearing] beards or goatees, sometimes clean-shaven.

  Could the man in court Tuesday be the twin?

  Thomas faced an ethical pinch few lawyers have encountered: Should he reveal his suspicion that his client was an imposter?

  Ultimately he did, and his suspicion was correct.

  Only in the eighth paragraph do we encounter what in journalism is known as the “nut” graph – the paragraph with the story's true news nugget:

  Marcus Mauceri had taken the place of his brother, Matthew, at the trial. The reason: He claimed his brother was flying in from out of state and couldn’t make it to the courthouse on time.

  In news reporting, the “lead” – a story’s first paragraph – is meant to include that nugget. More than one press critic has lamented the inroads made by flash storytelling into simple who-what-where-when-why-how reporting. One wrote:

  Among the major menaces to American journalism today (and there are so many that it hardly seems worth while even beginning this little article) is the O.Henry-Irvin Cobb tradition. According to this pretty belief, every reporter is potentially master of the short-story, and because of it we find Human Interest raising its ugly head in seven out of every eight news columns and a Human Document being turned out every time Henry H. Mackle of 1356 Grand Boulevard finds a robin or Mrs. Rasher Feiman of 425 West Forty-Ninth Street attacks the scissors grinder.

  Copy readers in the old days used to insist that all the facts in the story be bunched together in the opening paragraph. This never made for a very moving chronicle, but at least you got the idea of what was going on. Under the new system, where every reporter has his eye on George Horace Lorimer, you first establish your atmosphere, then shake a pair of doves out of the handkerchief, round off your lead with a couple of bars from a Chopin etude, and finally, in the next to last paragraph, divulge the names and addresses and what it was that happened. …

  Most of the trouble began about ten years ago when the Columbia School of Journalism began unloading its graduates on what was then the N.Y. Tribune (retaining the best features of neither). …

  Fine writing in news stories was actually encouraged by the management and daily prizes were offered for the best concealed facts. The writer of this article was a reporter at the time – “the worst reporter in New York City” the editors affectionately called him – and one day he won the prize with a couple of sticks on the funeral of Ada Rehan. This story consisted of two paragraphs of sentimental contemplation of old-time English comedy with a bitterly satirical comparison with modern movie comedy, and a short paragraph at the end saying that Ada Rehan was buried yesterday. Unfortunately the exigencies of make-up necessitated the cutting of the last paragraph; so the readers of the Tribune never did find out what inspired this really beautiful tribute to somebody. …

  A picture of the City Room of [one New York paper], by one who has never been there, would disclose a dozen or so nervous word artists, each sitting in a cubicle furnished to represent an attic, sipping at black coffee, with now and then a dab of cocaine, writing and tearing up, writing and tearing up, pacing back and forth in what the French call (in French) le travail du style. One feels that back copies of [that paper] should be bound and saved for perusal on rainy days when the volumes of “Harpers Round Table” have begun to pall.

  The writer quips that soon such a style will creep even into the reporting of overseas news, and concludes:

  When this has happened, we can have newstickers installed in our homes and let the newspapers give themselves over entirely to the belles lettres.

  This was written by Robert Benchley for The New Yorker.

  In 1925.
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ADDENDUM (9 May 2010): As incisive as is Mr. Benchley's dissection, things changed at the magazine in the next decade, according to Genius in Disguise, Thomas Kunkel's 1995 biography of The New Yorker founder and editor Harold Wallace Ross. 
  Kunkel writes that there was a "happy development that distinguished The New Yorker of the late Thirties. This was the explosion of reporting talent at the magazine, and the growing prominence of their journalism. These new voices belonged to young writers, most with newspaper experience but all with freer, more interpretive writing styles that was typical of the dailies. They drew on the fiction techniques of narrative, character development, shading and irony to tell their stories - stories that just happened to be true. Their so-called literary journalism was a hybrid of a very high order." 
  These writers, Kunkel adds, "probably did the most to advance the innovative, literate reportage that became a New Yorker trademark. They set the standard for all the great New Yorker reporters who followed, as well as the so-called New Journalists of the Sixties." Kunkel is referring to writers such as Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson, among many others. 
  So, you see, one man's disdain is another decade's Big Bang. 

Crime of the Century (Emergency Ride Divison)

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Plainly, Quandria Bailey is a woman of monumental resourcefulness, a fact that evidently escaped New Haven authorities recently, if an April 25 report on the Web site of WSFB-TV Eyewitness News 3 is credible, and why wouldn't it be? A station with that many letters and numbers and words in its name must do its homework. 
  Ms. Bailey, who is twenty-eight, apparently was having trouble getting to Meridian, the town in which she lives, from the Van Dome Night Club, at 102 Hamilton Street, in New Haven, late one night, and so, showing remarkable ingenuity, she phoned 911 and asked for a ride home. 
   (We do not know which night it was, because the report on the WSFB Web site does not say. This is an appalling journalistic oversight for which the many-named, -numbered and -lettered station should be roundly rebuked. Is it really that difficult to report fully and factually? The answer for First of All, who worked at a mainstream daily for some years, is yes indeed; we made so many errors that we should have been fired countless times. This is why we now write a blog in which, with a disquieting lack of empathy, we decry others' fallible reporting. We are, in short, idiots. Rather, an idiot - who is rather an idiot.)
  That Ms. Bailey called 911 not once but six times suggests that emergency operators were, figuratively if not literally, asleep at the switch. If someone called to ask you for a ride home, wouldn't you give her one? After all, being stuck outside of a night club on an early morning unnamed by WSFB is, in essence, torturous. By that point in the party, one just wants to return home, soak one's feet, and lose oneself in serial episodes of, say, "Whale Wars." 
  Alas, New Haven police, as police will, saw things differently. They arrested Ms. Bailey on six counts of misuse of the emergency 911 system, according to the by-now suspect reporting on the WSFB site. She was sprung from the can after posting a thousand dollars in bail, and is slated to appear in court on May 5. 
  Incidentally, the Van Dome nightclub (WSFB calls it "Vandome"; really, the mainstream media are just coming apart at the seams), according to its Web site (which we would link here, except that links keep disappearing from this blog, something that those, and we mean this with love, motherfuckers at Google are going to get an earful about), boasts theme nights that include "In Those Jeans (The $500 Blue Jean Party)," a Thursday night party sensibly called "Thursday Nights (Music by DJ Cocoa Chanelle)," and "Reggaeton Fridays," as well as performances by various no-doubt skilled DJs. 

  It is possible that New Haven 911 operators knew this, and therefore it was, for them, an act of kindness to refuse Ms. Bailey a ride. Why, they were probably thinking, would anyone want to leave such a blazing hot spot before it had gone cold for the night?

Crime of the Century (A Tale of One Nutty Chair Divison)

PROCTOR, Minn. - One day about a year and a half ago, a man named Dennis LeRoy Anderson, of Proctor, demonstrated that he is wildly creative, exceptionally mechanically gifted, and possessed of a perhaps overenthusiastic and potentially detrimental passion for beer. 

  Mr. Anderson, who runs a professional auto shop at his home, designed and outfitted a recliner - the type of comfy chair you see in front of televisions in better homes and trailers - with a converted lawnmower motor, headlights, a steering wheel, a stereo, cup holders and a National Hot Road Association sticker on its headrest. The chair could travel as fast as twenty miles per hour. 

  That accounts for Mr. Anderson's creative and mechanical gifts. His love of beer manifested, or perhaps over-manifested, on the day and evening of August. 31, 2008. 

  After enjoying a number of beers at home - the exact tally is left unstated in an October 30, 2009 Minneapolis Star-Tribune report - Mr. Anderson drove his chair to a bar called the Keyboard Lounge, located at 224 North 3rd Avenue, in Proctor. (View the bar's exterior here.)  

  There he consumed more beer. His total, he later told police, was "eight or nine" that day. His blood alcohol content, police would learn, after administering a field sobriety test, was .29. That's more than three times the legal limit for driving in Minnesota. 
  Mr. Anderson was blissfully unaware of this fact - or, evidently, of any others - when, presently, he left the Keyboard Lounge and settled into his motorized chair. Presumably, the goal of puttering home somewhere floated in his be-fogged noggin. 
  Alas, things don't always turn out as we might hope. Mr. Anderson promptly crashed the chair into a Dodge Intrepid parked nearby. 

   When police arrived, Mr. Anderson was treated for minor injuries and given the sobriety test, during which, Deputy Police Chief Troy Foucault told the Star-Trib, he "failed everything." To add insult to intoxication, it turned out that Mr. Anderson's driver's license had already been revoked for a prior drunk-driving conviction. 

  Police took Mr. Anderson, who is sixty-one, to the station and threw him in the pokey. At trial he was sentenced to one hundred and eighty days in jail and fined $2,000. The jail time and half the fine were stayed contingent on his serving a two-year probation with various conditions.

  Here now we leave the tale of Mr. Anderson in order to follow the captivatingly byzantine one of the chair. Proctor police impounded it when they arrested Mr. Anderson. It was then to be sold at a police auction, the proceeds from which would benefit the department.

  Foucault, the deputy police chief, characterized the chair to the Star-Tribune as being "quite decked out," and said "quite a few people" had called about it. He joked that he even might bid on it, except for the fact that "I have kids who would take it out and drive it on the street." 
  This seems just the kind of things kids should be encouraged to do, providing that the cups in the chair's holders contain, say, Coca-Cola or, at the extreme, Red Bull rather than beer, because beer can so fully harsh a magic mushroom high. 

  It is not tangential to point out that, in its lede, the Star-Trib called the chair a La-Z-Boy. This is important because, as the paper reported in a November 3, 2009 followup, a five-day eBay auction, undertaken by the Proctor police force, pushed the asking price of the chair, listed as a La-Z-Boy, to roughly $40,000, and drew national media attention.

  A mere eleven hours before the auction's deadline, the La-Z-Boy company faxed a complaint to the Proctor police chief, a man charmingly named Walter Wobig. The company, citing copyright concerns, protested the use of the its name in the eBay listing, inasmuch as the chair that Mr. Anderson had modified was not, in fact, a La-Z-Boy recliner. 

  Chief Wobig is to be forgiven for having listed the motorized chair as a La-Z-Boy. The brand is so well known that it has come to stand for all recliners, much as "Xerox" has for copiers and "Kleenex" for tissues. 
  In addition, the chief had been unduly influenced by the incorrect use of that brand name in the rash of media reports on the auction. This shows that the only people less adept at fact checking than police chiefs are reporters, an observation that does nothing to inspire a great deal of confidence in the condition of the ailing Fourth Estate. 
  In time, Chief Wobig had a cordial telephone conversation with a La-Z-Boy representative. That person asked the chief to ensure that the eventual buyer refrain from referring to the chair as a La-Z-Boy, and then wished him luck with the sale. 

  By that time, however, the listing had mysteriously disappeared from eBay. Did La-Z-Boy contact the online auction house and threaten it with legal action, such as, for example, sentencing eBay CEO John Donahoe to a forty-day La-Z-Boy recliner confinement and a force-feeding on Pabst Blue Ribbon, Cheetos and "Dog the Bounty Hunter?" Alas, we shall never know.

  Chief Wobig, unsuccessful in contacting eBay about the missing listing, re-listed the chair, once again setting the low bid at $500. The second auction also fell through. (Press reports are sketchy as to why.)

  All of which brings us to this month. An April 21 Associated Press story reported that a Duluth, Minn. resident - one of fifteen people competing for the chair in a Do-Bid.com auction ending April 18 - placed a winning bid of $3,700, an amount markedly lower than the $40,000 being batted about during the first eBay sale. 
  It is conceivable that the price suffered such a monumental drop because the chair is not a La-Z-Boy. It is more likely, however, that the feverish national attention of a year or so ago had so almost wholly waned that no one wanted to buy the goddamned thing. The public is a fickle mistress.

  There are lessons to be learned from this twisted tale, and they are as follows: 
  1. Corporations are psychotically protective of their brands, and woe betide he or she who uses one without permission. 
  2. Kids would not even entertain the idea of driving motorized chairs on the streets if there were a video game - one they could play in the comfort of their rumpus room - that featured such a chair, a totally awesome idea that First of All is, right this minute, in the process of copyrighting.
  3. If you are going get trashed and crash a motorized recliner, at least consider shaving so that you look nice in your mug shot. 

  

  

  

  

News That Makes Life Worth Living (Loving to Death Division)

 MOSCOW, March 20 -- A Southern Moscow couple evidently decided it would be fun to have sex in their car, and to ward off the chill of the Russian winter they turned on the engine. Alas, sometime during the act, they died of carbon monoxide poisoning, Reuters reported Wednesday. 
   The wire service quoted the Russian Interfax news agency as quoting an unnamed police source as saying that "a man and a woman retreated to their Volkswagen to have sex." The car was parked in a tiny garage. Sometime "during the act of closeness," according to the police source, the pair inhaled the gas and died. 
   One is boggled by all aspects of this story, not least this: sex in a Volkswagen? Really? 
   With their fact-light reporting, Interfax and Reuters have completely dropped the ball. The news services neglected to inform readers about the mechanics of sex in a VW, the color of the car, the age of the couple, the position the pair was in and whether or not one or both had achieved, well, lift-off before the blessed end arrived. These are the kinds of details that make or break a story. 
   It seems sad that we will never know. 

Queer Notes From all Over (Underwear Occasions Bad Writing Division)

SYDNEY, Australia, March 5 - Reuters Life!, evidently a life-style offshoot of the Reuters news wire service, reports that underwear in a new, "eco-friendly" AussieBum line are composed of twenty-seven percent banana fiber, sixty-four percent cotton and nine percent lycra. 
   The two-graf Reuters Life! report, though alluring, is hazy. It notes that the banana fiber, made from bark weave found in banana plants, "makes the underwear not only lightweight, but also very absorbent...." This sounds promising, but what there is for the underwear to absorb Reuters Life! does not say.
   Lloyd Jones, an AussieBum functionary, noted that if the undies were to contain any more than twenty-percent of the banana fiber, "it might get a bit squishy." Mmmmm. 
   Jones added, according to Reuters Life!, that "wearers did not have to worry about real monkeys, because the underwear does not smell like a banana." 
   What it does smell like Jones did not say, perhaps because, in a monumental journalistic oversight, the Reuters Life! reporter, a woman by the name of Amy Pyett, failed to ask him. Or perhaps she did and her editor, a woman named Miral Fahmy, simply cut the information. Alas, we shall never know. 
   We also cannot know whether it was Ms. Fahmy or a nameless copy-editor who wrote the hed (headline),  but whoever it was should be disciplined severely. It read: "Aussie Underwear Has Gone Bananas."
   And Ms. Fahmy really shouldn't have let Ms. Pyett get away with this lede (first paragraph): "Australian underwear company AussieBum has been monkeying around and the result is a range of men's underwear made with bananas." 
   Not only is that factually wrong - the ingredient is banana bark weave, not bananas - but it is exemplary of the kind of writing that is driving readers away  from newspapers and leading, you see, to the collapse of the Fourth Estate. 
   Here, for curious readers, are some examples of AussieBum underwear. I don't know whether or not they're the banana-bark-weave ones, but who cares? The pictures are lovely. 
   

News That Makes Life Worth Living (No News is Bad News Division)

KNOXVILLE, Tenn., March 11 - The pressures of television journalism sometimes can be overwhelming. 

   Between collecting facts, preparing an on-air report and ensuring that one's hair is just perfect, the demands of the job can spark anxiety and also nervousness, another word for "anxiety." 

   Occasionally, reporters simply lose it, and understandably. Here is a case. Reporter Gordon Boyd, of WVLT-TV, in Knoxville, simply lost it during a March 4 report.
   We post this in the interests of bettering American journalism and not in any way to guffaw, chuckle or snort at or about Mr. Boyd. 

   

Crime of the Century (The Meter is Running Division)

FAIRBANKS, Alaska, March 11 - For one woman who hails from the North Pole, if once is nice, twice, or even thrice, is nicer. 
   Lana L. Schneidewind, twenty-seven, has been charged with second-degree felony robbery and misdemeanor theft for allegedly waltzing into a Fairbanks, Alaska, Fred Meyer store last Friday and waltzing out with a television set for which she'd declined to pay, then attempting to employ a taxicab as her getaway vehicle, according to a March 6 story in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner ("The Voice of Interior Alaska Since 1903").
   Ms. Schneidewind, a consistent soul, is alleged to have done more or less the same thing in December. Twice. 

   The December incidences occurred at a Sam's Club. That she tried it this time at a Fred Meyer store suggests that the latter has a better selection of TVs than the former. Sam's Club might want to get on the stick. 
   Daily-Miner reporter Chris Frieberg writes that Ms. Schneidewind (hereinafter referred to as Ms. S.; how many times, really, is one expected to type out "Shneidewind"?) allegedly refused to pay for the $450 set. (Plainly, it was not a plasma TV, as even the inexpensive models run nearly ten times more than the set Ms. S. favored). A clerk who followed her out of the store told her the television did not belong to her. 
   This shows the excellence of Fred Meyer customer care. Aware that, even at Ms. S.'s youthful age, memory loss does occur, the clerk was  kind enough to alert her to the fact that the television set she was carrying was not, technically or legally, hers. With all the distractions these days - the World Wide Web, Twitter, the state of Brad and Angelina's relationship - it is difficult, sometimes, to track even the simplest things. A store clerk bringing reality into focus for customers is an excellent example of corporate civic duty at its finest. One wonders, not altogether idly, whether Sam's Club clerks show the same level of thoughtfulness.
   After leaving the store, television in hand (hands?), Ms. S. got into a cab. The Daily-Miner's Freiberg, obviously an accomplished reporter with a strong style, nonetheless appears to have been unable to unearth exactly why a cab was handily waiting nearby. Perhaps Ms. S. called for it at her home, rode in it to the Fred Meyer store, and then told the driver, "Wait here, please. I'm just going to steal a television, and then we'll be on our way." 
   As it turns out, when Ms. S. entered the cab, she reached over the driver's shoulder and tried to steal money out of his shirt pocket. The driver, as Frieberg writes, "was able to protect his cash by clenching the money in his fist." 
   Freiberg, a superb storyteller, further writes that "the suspect" - that would be Ms. S. - "gave up the fight and walked away from the scene when passersby approached the cab."    
   Whatever her societal transgressions, Ms. S. should be applauded for her ingenuity. That she required a cab to help tote the filched televisions suggests that she does not own a car. These days, that makes her a "green" hero. The radically-inclined and deeply self-righteous bicyclists on, for example, San Francisco's streets would no doubt hoist the woman on their shoulders and parade her through town, if only they could do so whilst simultaneously balancing on their bicycles and complaining about the cars around them. 
   On the other hand, is it possible that Ms. S. was stashing televisions in preparation for bestowing them upon the town's less privileged, and TV-less, citizens, Oprah-giveaway-style? Alas, we will never know.
   Alternately, it is possible, given that Ms. S. lives at the North Pole, that she is operating under a pseudonym, and is, in fact, Mrs. Santa Claus. Perhaps the elves were lagging in the TV-production area, and Santa thought it best simply to send the wife out to pinch a few from the local Fred Meyer. It's not like the children of the world - those who have been nice, that is, not naughty - would know the difference. 
   Sadly, these scenarios are unlikely. Ms. S. has been brought up on theft charges before now, suggesting that there's really not much to do in Fairbanks save to engage in petty crime and, if the opportunity presents itself, to watch television.


   [A journalistic side note. Here is Freiberg's lede graf (that's newspeak for lead, or first, paragraph, which in a news story is meant to convey the key information included in the report): "A North Pole woman who was arrested last year on suspicion of stealing televisions from Sam's Club and hiring a cabbie as a getaway driver has been accused of doing the same thing at another store one week after posting bail in her first case." The Associated Press picked up the story and ran it on their wire. Here's the AP lede: "Police said a North Pole woman accused in December of stealing televisions and hiring a cabbie as her getaway driver is now accused of trying it again." You see? AP reporters can be just as lazy - and prone to near-plagiarism - as the rest of us. Granted, in its next sentence the AP cited the Daily-Miner as a source. But still.]
   
   

The Joys of Holy Matrimony (Sharpest Blade in the Drawer Division)

LAS CRUCEZ, New Mexico, March 11 - A woman from Las Crucez, N.M. (pop. roughly 95,000) has been charged with three counts of aggravated battery against a household member, and a separate battery count, for allegedly stabbing her ex-husband after she looked through the call history of his cellular telephone.
   A March 7 Associated Press story declined to say what she discovered in in the phone. A cursory Google search - one never clicks past the first page, because one has better things to do, such as napping - shows that other news outlets, including Las Crucez television stations, are as lazy as this reporter: all ran the AP story, so details about the telephone's contents remain sketchy all across the World Wide Web (www.).
   The story is full of suggestive details, however, each of which seems a perfect springboard for a novel (or, these days, a Twitter posting).
   "According to police," the AP writes,"[the woman] and her 29-year-old ex-husband were at her home late Thursday when she became upset after looking through his cell phone's history."
   (This information appeared in the second graf - that's newspeak for paragraph - of the AP story. The AP did not write "[the woman]." They wrote "Shaw," indicating that this was the woman's Christian name. But the first graf does not give her full name. This is an oversight of monumental proportions, and points to the appalling state of American journalism. If you can't trust the AP, whom can you trust?)
   Why, one wonders, were they at her home? They are, for goodness sake, ex-husband and -wife. One would think it prudent, not to say preferable, to maintain a good deal of distance between oneself and a second party under those circumstances. Alas, those enjoying, or who have enjoyed, "a union between a man and a woman" have their own ways, some of which are mysterious in the extreme. 
   The AP quotes detectives as saying that the mysteriously one-named Shaw, who was mysteriously enjoying (enduring?) the company of her ex-husband, became enraged at the mysteriously un-reported, and deeply mysterious, contents of her husband's portable telephone. Not altogether mysteriously, she drew a knife "and started swinging at her husband, striking him at least three times."
   His injuries were, according to the AP, "not life-threatening." Perhaps if the couple had still been married, the woman would have tried harder to do serious damage to the man she had taken for better or worse, in sickness and health, till death did them part. After all, if death did them part, the contents of his carry-around telephone would be moot, now wouldn't they?
   Plainly, heterosexuals take seriously the institution of marriage. Even after disrespecting the sacred institution by bailing on it, they are so drawn to the one to whom they pledged their troth that, when the loved one disobeys, they feel compelled to stab the shit out of them. 
   Gays and lesbians waiting for the blessed day when same-gender marriage rights become available should take note.