Betteridge’s law of headlines strikes again!
“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
An EDITORIALIn today’s paper online:
The Trump Administration Is Lying to Our Faces. Congress Must Act.
With this illustration:
The federal government owes Americans a thorough investigation and a truthful accounting of the Saturday morning shooting of Alex Jeffrey Pretti on a Minneapolis street. When the government kills, it has an obligation to demonstrate that it has acted in the public interest. Instead, the Trump administration is once again engaged in a perversion of justice.
…
The article goes on to say all the stuff we’ve said here over and over, but it’s encouraging to FINALLY hear (read) an unequivocal condemnation of trump’s LIES in a major publication. And using the word LYING in the headline instead of some cowardly euphemism.
WTG, NYT! Keep ‘em comin’!
Googling site:.nytimes.com, I am finding many headlines regarding Trump that include the word lie, lies, or lying. What they have in common is that they are opinion articles. I did find one from last February that was labeled “analysis,” a label American newspapers traditionally slap on hard news articles that border on opinion.
This is not to endorse making the word lie more common in the Times. While every English composition principle has exceptions, show not tell is a good one. And how often the New York Times follows that principle tells us nothing about whether it is neutral or pro-Trump.
I don’t mean to jump on you personally as this point is relevant to a great many posts in the thread. I do not judge whether a newspaper is pro-Trump or anti-Trump or in between by the intensity of the vocabulary. Most Times articles focusing on DJT reasonably lead to negative conclusions even if not crammed down the reader’s throat.