Christie: A fine sixth place showing everywhere
What?
The headline in The Star-Ledger after the last Republican presidential debate was “IT’S ON.” in nearly two-inch high, all-capital letter, headlines, followed–mercifully–not by an exclamation point but by a curious red dot. While the headline was, at best, ambiguous, the subhead beneath it told the story, at least from the perspective of New Jersey’s largest newspaper: “While the divide between Trump and Cruz is the big news, experts say Gov. Christie’s solid debate keeps him on the rise.”
Well, no. It didn’t–and, in a moment, the figures that show the fallacy of the headline.
But, first, just a brief journey into the arcane world of journalism with this question: What in the world did that front page mean to say?
What’s on? If the Trump/Cruz “divide” is the “big news,” why does the state’s largest newspaper concentrate on something other than the “big news?” And the use of so-called “experts”–not just by the Ledger but by all sinking media outlets–is getting, well, tedious.
Back in the day when I worked for The Star-Ledger–and, still, today, but not so much–reporters were encouraged by their editors to keep dead stories alive by reaching out to a third party for a comment that could be magically converted into a news stories. This was especially true of investigative stories where a report has spent loads of time coming up with shady dealings by some political figure. The story is written–and the reaction is, well, zero.
So what you do is this: You call some investigative agency. County prosecutor, say. Or state criminal justice division chief. The feds (Christie was good this way, although, often, he or one of his assistants was the source of the investigation in the first place, so the pump was primed). Most of the time, you’d get a comment like: “Well, of course, we’re interested in allegations that state Sen. Wetlands stole heron eggs and sold them on the open market in Secaucus–we’ll look into it.”
Bingo. The next day’s headline: “State to investigate Wetlands,” and the lead paragraph would contend the state is probing the allegations that “originally appearedChristie: A fine sixth place showing everywhere | Bob Braun's Ledger: