I am admittedly a curmudgeon, but my frustration with the lazy editing of news articles (specifically, their titles) boiled over today.
Should not articles ostensibly written by professional writers display at least some semblance of accuracy and attention to detail?
Notice these two egregious blunders I saw on my phone today while perusing the latest “news”:
Doesn’t everyone on God’s green earth know it was a helicopter crash, not a plane crash?
And what about this - what’s wrong with this picture (article title)?
“The MLB”? What?!? So expanding the acronym out in your mind it reads, “Patrick Mahomes Reflects on What He Learned from His Dad’s Career in the Major League Baseball.” Heavens to Murgatroyd! If all the superfluous “the”s were stacked from Monrovia to the Moon, and then toppled, there would be a surplus of empty space left behind to jam in “helicopter” where “plane” was telescoped in (and plenty extra, to boot).
So the crux of the biscuit is, Why can’t news organizations (“the media”) hire copy editors to see to this stuff? Not to sound like an old fussbudget, but what happened to the artisans referred to by H. Wads Longfellow in his 1850 poem The Builders, of whom was stated (slightly paraphrased):
In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For God sees everywhere.
If builders were previously meticulous about things that would remain unseen by human eyes (only seen by God), why can’t today’s mediamongers exert a little more effort on things that are seen by us mere mortals?
Blatant mistakes like those above tend to erode confidence in the writer and their employer or sponsor. If they don’t even know it was a helicopter crash, and not a plane crash, do you really expect the article to be well-researched? If they think “the Major League Baseball” sounds right, why would you expect anything other than a cacophonous din from their further words on the subject?
Now I realize that these titles probably were in some cases actually penned by copy editors, not the writers of the articles themselves. So the question in those cases is, Why aren’t the incompetent copy editors re-assigned to some other duty, and competent ones (who know English usage well and keep abreast of the news) hired to replace them?
So yes, there are hundreds of copy editor jobs that should be filled. The need is demonstrably there. But will they be made available? Do the news media organizations responsible for these senseless slaughterings of logic and the English language care enough about quality to do something about it?
Now here’s my theory on what’s really happening here:
The media moguls do employ copy editors, but one of two problems (maybe both) conspire to produce these lamentably poor results:
1) The employers expect the copy editors to work too fast - they load them down with so much work to be done “immediately” that the copy editors don’t have the time to produce any better than slipshod work
2) The employers pay wages so low that they can only attract the desperatest of the desperate to grind at this particular mill
The employers’ mantra seems to be, “Why make a buck when we could make a buck and a penny?”
They may eventually find that they have been penny wise and pound foolish when fewer and fewer people take them seriously due to the poor quality of their wares.
What happened to pride in one’s work, as Longfellow literally waxed poetic about? Where does the buck stop?