Reading abstracts for Week 8

 This is my best abstract for Advanced Editing yet, if I do say so myself!

 

I read “Who You Callin’ Ungrammatical?” by Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe and looked at Paul Brians’ “List of Common Errors in English” page.

            I admit I read the Globe article because I use the word whom and am against its demise. I’m not so pedantic that I correct people if they use one when they should have used the other, but I use whom in my writing and even in my speech because I like being correct and as specific as possible.

            However, once I really thought about it, I decided it may just be time for whom to go. After all, we don’t say thou or shan’t anymore — English evolves.

            This is the gist of the Globe article. It was written in response to a reader complaining about a headline: ”Who are you calling working class?” The reader argues that it should have been ”Whom are you calling working class?” and technically, he or she is right. But even the newspaper staff there thought this was a silly claim, and they found some people who study English and agree: ”Beginning a question with whom in contemporary standard English would not just be unusual, it would be bizarre,” says linguist Geoffrey Pullum, coauthor of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. ”Insisting on whom, as some people still do when writing for print, is more and more looking like an affectation.”

            Even worse, I think, than not using whom when it should have been used is using it when it should not have been. Possibly in an effort to adopt the affectation Pullum describes, I’ve heard and read people throw a whom into a sentence incorrectly, presumably because they think it makes them sound smart. I’ve seen the same thing happen with the usage of I in a compound objective case: “This could not be a prouder moment for him and I.” A Globe reader who responded to the other reader’s initial complaint noted that the hypercorrect whom ”is the blind spot of literate Americans.”

 

            Paul Brians’ “List of Common Errors in English” is very extensive and a good resource, and, considering the other article I read, I decided to look at his who/whom entry.

            He offers the standard explanation that who is used in the subjective case and whom is used in the objective case, but he also goes further and includes his own analysis, which I like. Brians brings up much the same argument as the Globe article in that he says whom isn’t really used to begin a sentence any longer, and in many cases, it just comes off as being showy.

            I like this helpful tip he gives: “Just try the ‘he or him’ test, and if it’s still not clear, go with ‘who.’ You’ll bother fewer people and have a fair chance of being right.”

Reading abstracts for Week 7

This week, I read “Before You Publish a Rape Victim’s Name…” from the Ethics section and “Can Suicide Coverage Lead to Copycats?” from the Taste & Sensitivity section. I chose these two articles because both these issues are red flags in a journalism newsroom, and writers and editors often aren’t sure how to approach stories related to these subjects — if at all.

 

            When it comes to rape, many people who have not been close to the experience, including journalists, have considered arguments for publishing victims’ names. By keeping the victims nameless and faceless, aren’t we making the story less real and doing them even more harm? Kelly McBride, a member of the Ethics Faculty at the Poynter Institute, spoke with a number of rape victims, crisis counselors and nurses, and she found the answer was overwhelmingly “no.”

            Even those who were familiar with journalistic practice and who realized that preserving victims’ anonymity would likely lead to a lack of empathy from readers were still very much against providing names and details. This is an important fact for journalists to realize before they campaign for full disclosure in news stories.

            Rather, McBride says, the goal of publications should be to portray rapes more accurately. First of all, most rape victims are children. Statistics are thrown out such as “650,000 women a year are victims of rape,” but in actuality it’s 300,000 women and 350,000 girls, which is horrible. Secondly, the majority of victims are raped by someone they know, and usually it happens through the use of manipulation or incapacitation through drugs or alcohol.

            Newspapers almost always give more inches and prominence to the sensational rape stories: the ones involving violence or kidnapping. Typical rape stories are assigned to the briefs section. This dichotomy leaves the public generally uninformed about the true nature of rape.

 

            The same can be said of suicide stories. According to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, the majority of suicides are sensationalized and mislead readers about typical suicide cases.

            Most people who commit suicide were depressed, whether that fact was known to family members or not. In Jamieson’s study of suicide stories in the New York Times, however, only about 7 percent of stories mentioned a history of mental illness. Instead, the stories were sensationalized, often being given flashy or romantic headlines and describing in detail how the person committed suicide.

            Excessive detail leads to another, more important problem than public ignorance: the possibility of copycats. News stories in Vienna about an increasing number of people jumping in front of subway cars to commit suicide were extensive and graphic. People who had been contemplating suicide read the details in the papers and decided to try the same method. When social scientists observed this trend, they notified the newspapers. When reporting on the suicides then dropped, there were 80 percent fewer attempts.

            A number of public health organizations released recommendations in 2001 for reporters covering suicide. The guidelines urge reporters to avoid mentioning the method of suicide in the headline, avoid prominent or repeated reporting on an individual suicide, avoid detailed descriptions of the method and avoid romanticizing the act of suicide or suggesting that such acts are the inexplicable acts of otherwise happy and normal individuals. However, that same year the Annenberg Public Policy Center interviewed 61 reporters and 15 editors who had reported on acts of suicide, and it found no awareness of the guidelines. During my two years at the Alligator we covered student suicides a number of times, and I had no idea the recommendations existed, and I’m fairly sure the other editors didn’t, either.

 

            What’s important to remember about the touchy topics of rape and suicide is that journalists should try to do no harm. Generally, we do go for the more sensational stories and we do use the more romantic headlines because it’s proven that that’s what people like to read. I don’t think ordinary, albeit accurate, stories portraying rape and suicide will ever be given the prominence of more high-profile and atypical cases because first and foremost, newspapers try to draw in readers. Many times I would say that this method of getting people to read more stories is fine, because we all know we’d rather read an interesting story than a run-of-the-mill one about the same topic. However, these sensitive cases are instances where I have to disagree on the method. Both rape and suicide are very sensitive topics, not just for the victims but also for relatives and friends, and journalists can have no idea what it’s like unless they’ve experienced it. I still don’t think anonymous stories indicative of the norm will be given the same number of inches or the same prominence in a paper as the sensational stories. But if nothing else except to be tactful, I would recommend that journalists at least stop romanticizing the stories they do print and refrain from providing more detail than what’s needed.

Reading abstracts for Week 6

I read “The Whoppers of 2007” in the Accuracy & Assertions of Fact category and “Accountability Journalism” in the Truth & Objectivity category.

            “The Whoppers of 2007” is about all the incorrect or misleading things politicians or their PACs said last year and tried to pass off as fact. What’s scary about all the entries FactCheck.org turned up is that most of them are obscure facts or figures that don’t sound outrageous. All these “facts” were broadcast and printed, so people heard or read them and had no reason to second-guess them and so took them to be true. Incorrect facts like these, whether reported wrong on purpose or by accident, are dangerous because they can then spread and perpetuate misinformation.

            “Accountability Journalism” suggests how reporters can take precautions to prevent false facts from getting published in the first place. The Poynter Institute offers different methods that may help: following up on given facts and what happens to signed bills and political promises seems like a good idea. Even if no incorrect facts are exposed, it will at least ensure that reporters hold politicians responsible for everything. I think AP Ohio’s “Reality Check” feature is a good idea. It makes sure reporters write about progress made or not made since bills were enacted and how this will affect Ohio citizens.

            Following up on previous political occurrences won’t help if news sources don’t initially catch errors from the first reporting. This can be helped with careful copy editing. The average copy editor probably won’t know if a fact seems incorrect off the top of his or her head unless it seems totally outrageous, but it is still up to copy editors to try to find out, even if facts seem plausible. That’s why having a variety of fact-checking resources is very valuable to copy editors.

Reading abstracts for Week 5

I chose to read the Method to our Mathness stories “How Not to Conduct a Presidential Poll” and “A Billion People Can Be Wrong.”

 

            The first story demonstrates all the things that can easily go wrong with polls that so few people remember to think about. The most obvious is, How do they decide parameters to answer their questions? The example given was a poll used to determine who is most likely to attend the Iowa caucus. How does the newspaper that made the poll decide what makes someone a likely candidate to go to the caucus?

Another problem is with the time period chosen to conduct polls. The one in question was a telephone poll performed between Christmas and New Year’s. The obvious problem here is that not many people will be home at this time of year, and the ones who are may have a particular trend in candidate preferences. Also, the smaller the poll group, the higher the margin for error. If a poll group is divided into further subgroups, there is a higher chance for discrepancies. Although the author of this particular critique, Barry Sussman, turned out to be wrong in calling out several of the Des Moines Register’s shortcomings, his ideas are basically true and must be taken into account when drawing conclusions from polls.

 

            Of course, knowledge like this about polls can be used to a businessperson’s advantage if they know how to manipulate numbers in their company’s favor. A good example is in the Sports Illustrated story “A Billion People Can Be Wrong.” The story looks into how Super Bowl publicists arrive at the claim that a billion people worldwide watch the big game. In actuality, the NFL reports that the Super Bowl will be broadcast to a potential audience of 1 billion. It’s the news services’ fault that they disregard the “potential” and interpret the 1 billion as fact, but it’s an error that works in the NFL’s favor.

 

            What both of these stories have in common is that they show that it definitely pays to pay attention when it comes to random numbers and statistics in news stories. Copy editors should be wary of taking claims at face value without questioning how the writer or publicist arrived at that determination. This is further emphasized by the third site I looked at, FactCheck.org. This site is limited to political facts, but it’s entirely for checking information about candidates and their policies, voting statistics and results, and also a source for recent happenings in the realm of politics. With the upcoming presidential election and all the ensuing news stories about it, this site is a valuable resource in straightening out claims that news stories make.