Oopsie

You know, everyone always tells me that Fox News is highly sensationalized, speculative and just plain wacky and, after watching certain newscasts, I often feel the same way.

But everyone deserves a second chance in my book, so today I decided to get my "news" from good old Fox ... I wanted to see what they had to say about the world this lovely morning.

Upon my first click, I read this:

GEORGETOWN, Pa. — Black, horse-drawn buggies glided past roadblocks in Lancaster County Thursday as hundreds of Amish families and their English friends prepared to bury four of the five young girls who were shot to death inside a schoolhouse this week.

Meanwhile, one of the five girls injured in the shootings was being taken off life support to come home to die.

Nice lead, inventive, minimal yet telling. I was drawn to the first line in the second paragraph immediately. Wait a second ... the fifth girl was shot and she is remaining alive with support, but does that mean she was shot to death? She's not dead yet, but she was shot to death? Is it possible to change the phrasing with the goal of less shock value and more accuracy?

But then I thought, maybe I'm wrong and this is protocol. So I clicked on to another story on the same topic. This one focused on an anti-gay church in Kansas that wanted to protest the girls' funerals due to their disagreement with the Amish way of living. Yada yada, blah blah blah ... and then we come to the last paragraph in the story.

On Monday, Charles Carl Roberts IV killed five girls — Naomi Rose Ebersole, 7; Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12; Marian Fisher, 13; Mary Liz Miller, 8; and her sister Lena Miller, 7 — in a rural Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pa.

OK, so I know this is wrong. Whether or not the writer in story 1 (Todd O'Connor) determined that because the shot would produce a death, it was OK to use the phrasing "shot to death," I have issue with the way writer Sara Bonisteel just went straight to "killed." Girl number 5, Anna Mae, was still alive at press time! It's simple enough to get it right and these examples were both insensitive and irresponsible and for what? This phrasing didn't even add to the shock value and sensationalism of the story ... they were just distasteful without a purpose.

Sickened, I figured that I can't trust anything, so I might as well read my horoscope for some entertainment and alas, accuracy in the unlikeliest of places!

Your energies continue to shift, drawing you into a conflict that stems from a difference of perspective rather than from a difference of goals. It's likely that you both want the same result, even if that's not apparent now. Use your analytical powers to find common ground and work from there.
Thursday, October 5, 2006

You know what I think? Whoever is spying on my little, insignificant life should go and work for Fox News and bring some order to the world.