A couple of Chi Trib stories today, encountered by page 11 of front section, demonstrate or at least illustrate something or other about editors’ and others’ mindset. Page 3 has, top left, two-column head, “Hussein: U.S. jailers beat, tortured me,” with subhead “3 describe brutality of ex-dictator’s regime.” Aamer Madhani’s lead justifies that: he subordinates “terror dispensed by Sadaam Hussein’s intelligence apparatus” to “the former Iraqi president said that he and his co-defendants have been beaten and tortured by their U.S. military jailers.”
Which is a laugh, right? Or am I not attuned to the mainstream-media zeitgeist?
Point: Reverse head and subhead and you have something closer to reality, ditto with lead.
Story two, on page 11, is by Trib-owned Baltimore Sun writer out of Burlington, Vermont: “The high toll on small state,” with subhead “Vermont, where war sentiments run hot and cold, has the most GI deaths per capita” and takeout quote above the head: “’All of this news of dying . . . now we’ve reached the tipping point.’ — Nancy Brown, Vermont coordinator of the national anti-war organization Military Families Speak Out.”
It’s stories like this that show why TribCo bought this Baltimore paper — so it could get Vermont stories that fit the above-mentioned zeitgeist. How about all this news of dying on mean streets of Chicago, tied in with breakdown of family life and denigration leading to loss of traditional values?
Nope. This writer and these editors want to puff the antiwar movement, or so it appears. Coming up (not): a Vermont story about military families that support the war.
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