Mistakes happen. I write a lot in my job, so I know this from personal experience. Sometimes mistakes are funny, sometimes they’re confusing and sometimes they’re just plain infuriating. I came across examples of each of these today in my Sunday reading.
The first is from the Architectural Digest January 2010 issue. There’s a feature article about a castle being renovated in France called “Treading On Medieval Ground.” In it we discover that the architect, Joseph Pell Lombardi, is fulfilling a long-held dream:
“Lombardi had always wanted to work on a medieval building, but medieval buildings are understandably scarce in the United States.”
Perhaps AD will feature one of these US-based medieval rarities in a future issue.
On the other end of the spectrum from the high-brow AD is our regional paper, the Eagle Tribune, which covers local matters on the north shore of Massachusetts. Today one of the front page stories caught my eye – “Groveland shuts down ‘Open Mike’: Talk show host says it’s over political criticisms.”
I was interested in finding out more about this apparent censorship, but sadly, any attempts to understand the story were frustrated by tortuous sentence structure and mysterious language. To start off, this is a story of an online radio show that is being barred from public access television. Somebody wants to keep Mike Bevelaqua off the air, or the Internet, or the TV or something:
“But Tim Coco, general manager of WHAV, said Tracy Gilford, a member of Groveland’s Cable TV Advisory Board, informed a staff member at the station on Monday that he had been manually preempting the “Open Mike Show” for several weeks because Groveland officials did not like criticism of the town’s government by Bevelaqua, who served as an elected official in the town for 30 years”
Manually preempting? How does this work? Does Gilford (or Coco) put his/their hands over the microphone while Bevelaqua is talking? Or does he stand in front of the camera? Or does he disconnect the network cable?
Dissatisfied with my inability to understand this story in the least, I turned to the Boston Globe, which is a bigger paper with editors and writers who earn a lot more money. Surely they would get it right.
The front page trumpets: UNDER THE ICY NORTH LURKS A ‘CARBON BOMB.’ This menace turns out to be peat moss. I’m still not clear how the peat moss will suddenly break out of the ground and like, explode, but wow, that’s some headline.
On page 4 we find two more stories on climate change – one breathless piece describes protests in Copenhagen as a “pulsating wave of humanity, tens of thousands strong.” The article continues in near-orgasmic tones to describe the split between “wealthy countries and countries still struggling to overcome poverty and catch up with the modern world.” You go, poor countries!
There’s an article that says this whole East Anglia email story is really overblown, and another about how a brave guy fought an evil homeowner’s association to put solar panels on his roof. None of these articles was marred by grammar or spelling errors, so clearly the editors were doing their jobs. Too bad their jobs don’t include ensuring that the paper provides anything approaching a balanced view. I’m not sure whether the climate is overheated, but the editors at The Boston Globe surely are.
