Friday, August 24, 2018
Headlines for August 24, 2018
Headlines with an * are the ones we managed to fit in in our allotted 11 minutes.
The segment has been off for two weeks so some of the headlines below are "old".
Worst and Most Misleading Headlines (WAMMH) -- August 24, 2018
CANDIDATES FOR “WORST”/”MOST DISGUSTING”:
*BY FAR THE WORST, THIS SEQUENCE OF THREE HEADLINES FROM BBC:
- Israeli airstrikes ‘kill woman and baby’
- Israeli airstrikes ‘kill woman and toddler’
- [10 minutes later, after complaints from the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the “Board of Deputies of British Jews”]: Gaza airstrikes ‘kill woman and child’ after rockets hit Israel
The complaint: .@BBCWorld this is a formal complaint by @IsraelMFA .This title is a deliberate misrepresentation of reality ( that’s the polite equivalent of “ this is a LIE”, if you don’t get it). Israelis were targeted by Hamas and IDF acts to protect them.Change it IMMEDIATELY!!! @IsraelMFA
So many things to say:
- The obvious, the implication that “rockets hitting Israel” (which killed no one) justifies killing the woman and her 1-year-old child
- The omission of any trigger for the rockets hitting Israel, which, as noted in the article, was the unprovoked Israeli murder of two members of Hamas the day before.
- The change from “Israeli” airstrikes, which properly identifies the perpetrator, to “Gaza” airstrikes, which obscures the perpetrator.
- The change from “baby” to “toddler” (a proper description of a 1-year-old) to “child” (which could mean anyone up to perhaps 18 years old, and evokes far less response from the reader, even if it is technically accurate, just like “cops kill unarmed man” is technically accurate even if the really accurate headline was “cops kill unarmed Black man”. By the way the woman was also nine months pregnant, so “unborn child” could have been added to the headline.
- The change of quote! If “woman and toddler” is an actual quote, you can’t just change it to “woman and child” on a whim! And if it is NOT an actual quote, it doesn’t belong in quotes.
Undocumented immigrant charged with murder in killing of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts
Undocumented Immigrant Charged With Murder Of Iowa Woman
Mollie Tibbetts’s suspected killer, in the U.S. illegally, told investigators about her final moments
The only way that the fact that the accused was undocumented would be significant would be if the motive for the murder was that she was about to turn him in to ICE. Otherwise, this kind of sensationalism, endemic to stories of this case, just feed Trump’s false stories about the dangers of undocumented immigrants.
And ironically:
Why Republicans can be accused of politicizing the Mollie Tibbetts tragedy
But guess what? That was the media from the get-go.
Mollie Tibbetts’ accused killer is in Iowa legally, his lawyer says, calling Trump 'sad and sorry' for weighing in
No one else seems to have picked up this story. No idea if it’s true. But if his lawyer is actually claiming this, isn’t it worth noting in all the stories referring to him as undocumented?
Verizon throttled fire department’s “unlimited” data during Calif. wildfire
Accurate headline, just a horrible story. They were actually told to switch to a more expensive plan to solve their problem!
*NASA backs designs for 3D-printed homes on Mars
We can't solve the homelessness problem in the U.S., but the brightest minds in the government are busy attacking the problem of building homes on Mars. Hooray!
CANDIDATES FOR “MOST MISLEADING”:
*Rudy Giuliani Stuns NBC’s Chuck Todd: ‘Truth Isn’t Truth’
Actually Giuliani was making a serious point. He frames it as “he-said, she-said” where there are two different “truths”, but we see it all the time in other ways. For example, “Russians poisoned the Skripals”, treated as unchallenged truth by the media despite a complete lack of proof and only the most tenuous of circumstantial evidence.
Russia has the Pixel 3 XL and nothing's going to stop this leak train now
Of course it's not "Russia", it's Russian bloggers (and possibly hackers), who have gotten their hands on Google's new phone months ahead of anyone else and are leaking details. And the point here is that every technical person in Russia, capable of the most cutting edge type of stuff, does not work for the government.
CANDIDATES FOR “FUNNIEST”:
*Trump says longstanding legal practice of flipping 'almost ought to be illegal'
LOL
*Michael Cohen's Lawyer Says His Client Would Never Accept Pardon From 'Corrupt' Trump
Like Michael Cohen is really likely to get a pardon from Trump. Right. But if he did, yeah sure, he’ll spend four years in jail standing on this principle. Right.
Polygraph panic: CIA director fretted his vote for communist
From 2016 but still amusing — John Brennan voted for Gus Hall for President in 1976. "We've all had indiscretions in our past...I was neither Democratic or Republican, but it was my way, as I was going to college, of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change."
*The USMC would like you to know that being in armed combat is exactly like playing Super Smash Bros.
USMC tweet: “Meet the characters in the smash hit military that has been defeating our foes since 1775. #SmashBrosUltimate”
You mean like Vietnam? Or Afghanistan?
