Good catch by Michael Getler, the ombudsman at The Washington Post, who chided his colleagues yesterday for putting this headline on an otherwise solid front page story about misleading claims from the Bush and Kerry campaigns by Post staff writers Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei:
“From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity; Scholars Say Campaign Is Making History With Often-Misleading Attacks.”‘
“I was troubled,” Getler writes, “by … the use of the word ‘unprecedented’ in the headline. This is a word that ought to be put in a journalistic lockbox. It is almost always confusing and an overstatement. The article reports that scholars and political strategists say ‘the volume of negative charges [by the Bush campaign] is unprecedented — both in speeches and in advertising.’ But one of the scholars quoted also points out that the distortions themselves are no worse than those ‘since the beginning of time.'”
Reminds us of an old city editor of ours whose enthusiasm for our work was, shall we say, more tempered than our own. Anytime he was approached by an especially enthusiastic reporter, he would disdainfully toss the manuscript in question into his “Read Sometime” box, as he opined for the 5,364th time:
“There are no new stories; only new reporters.”
–Steve Lovelady
