Another Dissembling Headline

Why do they do this? Is the headline tease, the need for readership so important that many in the media stoop to misrepresenting the essential truth of a story. This story for example, from Detroit’s Fox News 2. Here’s a screen capture of the headline:

2014-09-11_Uniform Not Allowed

If you stop at the headline, you’re pissed. Another zero-tolerance policy from a brain dead school administration? you wonder. What’s this country coming to?

And then you read the story. It wasn’t the school, it was a security guard with a firm contracted by the school to handle security. And what did the school administration do when it found out what had happened?

Rochester Schools superintendent Robert Shaner, who is a veteran himself, quickly took care of the situation apologizing to the family for their troubles.

Shaner sent a letter to Fox 2 which says: ‘The district has apologized for any perception that individuals in uniform are not welcome in the school. The district does not have a policy excluding individuals in uniform and will be working with administration and the firm that handles our security to make sure district policies are understood and communicated accurately.’ (Emphasis supplied)

So why is this a story in the first place? I’m guessing it’s simply because the writer’s slip, er, bias was showing.

Cross posted to PartialPostst.com

Source Checking the Norse Warrior Claims or Stubby the Rocket’s 15 Minutes Are Up

If you were paying attention last week, you probably read this headline: Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female. I know I did. I think I even passed the link along, without checking the facts behind the claim. Without checking the source, even though the story linked to another story in USA Today’s Science Fair, (which in turn links to the original source, an article by Shane McLeod in the journal Early Medieval Europe for which you need a password unfortunately, so we won’t go there). Interestingly, both the original research and the USAToday piece that the Viking Corpses story relies on, were published over three years ago in July 2011–stop the presses!!! But I digress.

Had I checked the original source–or even just the USA Today story–I would have discovered that the bottom line of this research is not that “half of the warriors were female,” but that, as Tracy V. Willson points out in her piece Raining On Your Parade About Those Women Viking Warriors, quoting from the original source:

‘These results, six female Norse migrants and seven male, should caution against assuming that the great majority of Norse migrants were male, despite the other forms of evidence suggesting the contrary. (Pg. 349 of original story; emphasis and page number supplied by me)

As Wilson stresses: note that, among other errors, the word migrants rather than the word warriors appears in the original story. Kind of minces the meat of the offending story’s headline.

The moral of my tale about this poorly reported-on story is always check the original source–if you can. Especially when it matters. Especially when the author’s name is Stubby the Rocket. Always.

A second moral comes to mind, one that I’ve mentioned multiple times on my blog Partial Posts: always read beyond the headline. In my experience, the headline rarely gets the story straight, even when the story below the headline is accurate.

Grammar Creep

So . . . I was doing some construction work on my Web site (more on this below) and blog, and I found myself typing the words Web site in an Update to an old post (this one, if you must know). As I typed the words in the update, I wondered–because I often forget things like this–whether it was Web site or web site. I googled the term, and among other things, I found this, a post by the Grammarist:

A few editorially conservative publications still use the two-word Web site, but this relic of the 1990s has fallen out of favor throughout the English-speaking world. The one-word, uncapitalized website now prevails by an overwhelming margin.

Now, given that I’d just been updating my own post about checking sources, I decided to check the Grammarist’s claims–he or she didn’t give any sources, though s/he did give some examples, all of which date from 2011 to 2012. (Based on this, I assume the undated post also dates to 2012.)

I have a favorite place to go to do this kind of thing: The Corpus of Contemporary American English or COCA. Unfortunately, I just realized, apparently COCA’s database only includes words through 2012; as a result, it’s difficult to test the Grammarist’s claim about what’s happening right “now.” Today. 2014. That said, I could test his/her claim as of 2012. Drum roll . . .

And the winner is! . . . . Web site or web site at 15,245 hits–my COCA search returned both versions in one batch. (A quick and very unscientific scan of the results tells me that it’s about 2/3rds to 1/3rd Web site to web site.) The one-word version, website, comes in at about half that, 7,318.

The Grammarist was correct about The New York Times. It’s Web site all the way, but so is The Washington Post–again, that’s as of 2012. (Though I did a search of The Washington Post’s Web site–web site, website, who can keep track–and discovered The Post must be of two minds in 2014 since I found instances of both the two-word, capitalized version and the one-word version. Oh well.)

Me? I’m in a quandary. Is mine an “editorially conservative” blog much like the politically liberal Times? Or should I position myself on the vanguard of the one-word, uncapitalized movement? I think I’ll stick with The New York Times on this one. Though I’m no prescriptionist, I do tend to move slowly when it comes to the English language. The AP Style Guide disagrees with me, The Times, and The (bi-polar) Post, by the way.

 

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