Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Headlines
One of my favorite TV segments of the week is Jay Leno's Monday night "Headlines." Most of these are silly, like one last night which read "Clinton Opposes Early Withdrawal." But every once in a while, one with actual significance. Like the one last night, where Leno showed a newspaper with two consecutive stories, one above the other. The first read "Visteon to lay off 74 workers," and the second read "Visteon CEO receives $7 million bonus." The audience did themselves proud by hissing appropriately, rather than laughing.
My headline of the day is this one from the San Jose Mercury News: "Bush invites critics to discuss war." Cindy Sheehan? Ah, no. Nor were any of the four actual opponents of the invasion itself, just a few in a long line of people whose criticism is confined to the "incompetence" with which the war has been waged.
Not that Bush was actually listening. He was too busy thinking about his impending trip to Iraq the Green Zone, a trip which AP preposterously describes as "Bush's second trip to Baghdad in less than three years." Wow, that many? And gosh, this trip even left Bush on the ground for a whole five hours, two more than the previous trip.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, American forces in Iraq killed a 6-month-old baby and a 4-year-old child in the process of killing seven suspected insurgents. AP naturally calls them simply "insurgents," no suspected about it, although they haven't the slightest information which would allow them to confirm the claims of the U.S. military. The AP does mention the death of "two children" in the opening sentence of the article, but their ages aren't mentioned until paragraph ten. Wouldn't want to shock the reader with the reality of the American war too quickly. Maybe they won't read that far. Certainly the headline "U.S. troops kill 7 insurgents in raid" gives no clue as to what follows.
