The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

It’s Not News, But Why Miss a Chance to Use ‘Palin’ in a Deceptive Headline?

Posted on | July 18, 2011 | 8 Comments

Today’s news from the Department of Deceptive Headlines:

Bristol Palin To Star In A Reality Show
With Disney Channel’s Kyle Massey

Checking my calendar — yep, it’s July 18 — I point out this headline from a press release issued on May 9:

BIO CHANNEL GREENLIGHTS UNTITLED
BRISTOL PALIN, CHRISTOPHER MASSEY
AND KYLE MASSEY DOCU-SERIES

Permit me further to share this tip about the practice of journalism: Never report old news as if you were breaking an exclusive.

A fact that was first announced in a press release 10 weeks ago is not news, and trying to pretend that it is news only makes you look stupid. A more accurate headline would have been:

MEDIAITE.COM HAS VIDEO OF
BRISTOL PALIN ON FOX NEWS

Which isn’t how they headlined it, because that wouldn’t permit Mediaite.com to pretend they’d scored The Big Scoop, when all they did was write a story about a cable TV interview and put their own logo on a video that has been on FoxNews.com since yesterday afternoon:

This cheap stunt would be too trivial to mention, had I not seen the Mediaite story as a Memeorandum thread, suggesting that some bloggers had not previously been aware of this 10-week-old news, even though I’d reprinted nearly the entire May 9 press release in a May 27 item at The American Spectator with the title, “The Palin Principle of Liberal Media Ethics.” I then linked that item here with the headline, “Media Ignores Black Woman Who Calls Palin ‘Funny, Nice and Genuinely Warm’.”

What I did not do on May 27 was to pretend that the (then) two-week-old announcement of Bristol’s reality-show deal was news. And yet you may rest assured that Mediaite.com’s deceptively-headlined story will be linked at various conservative blogs because it evidently never occurs to anyone to check the facts.

It is at times like this that I recall the famous words of P.J. O’Rourke: “What the fuck? What the fucking fuck, huh?“

Category: Blogging, Bristol Palin, Celebrities, How This Here Internet Thingy Works, Sarah Palin, Video

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