Yesterday's Hidden Paragraph; Today's Stand Alone Story
rantingprofs.com
By Cori Dauber
With more details, the fact that the checkpoint where the Italians were shot at was set up for the protection of Amb. Negroponte now receives its own headline from the Times (on pg. A-7), not that the additional details particularly add anything. All we know today that we didn't know yesterday is that he was headed to a dinner appointment with General Casey and that, yes, normally he would have travelled by the (much safer) mode of helicopter, but the weather was too bad.
nytimes.com
Boy, now they're cracking that story wide open!
And I'm sure this is driving the press corp nuts:
American commanders, including General Casey, have so far declined to clarify what took place that night, citing a continuing investigation.
That stance by the commanders has left the American Embassy in the position of being the prime source of information from the United States about the incident.
Let me complain once again about the same journalistic issue I pointed out yesterday.
Maybe you aren't interested in the Italian-shooting story.
Maybe you spotted the Negroponte angle by some miracle yesterday, and you quickly realize that today's story just isn't adding that much.
Maybe you are interested, but glean what you're going to glean within a few paragraphs, and move on.
That would be a shame, because in any of those instances you would miss the fact that in paragraph 13, this piece makes a sharp, sharp turn. Certainly a turn that no reader, not an average reader, not a sophisticated reader, not a reader informed at any level on the Iraq story could predict from the first 12 paragraphs.
Here's paragraph 13:
Also on Friday, Iraqi political factions continued jockeying in advance of a final agreement to form a government in the new 275-member National Assembly. A focus of negotiations has been Article 58 of the transitional law, which refers to the restoration of property stripped from tens of thousands of Kurds in the northern city of Kirkuk by Saddam Hussein's government.
Frankly, there are so many paragraphs on this issue (and it's important enough) I don't understand why this and the Negroponte/checkpoint story can't both be just short little stories. But if the Times is going to insist on putting stories like this into one story, it's simply unfair to its readers to put two such radically different stories under one headline. There should be a headline that informs the reader that the story is a kind of roundup of Iraq issues (hell, the last paragraph is a report -- utterly devoid of useful information, but still -- that a Marine has been killed in an accident.) |
