Monday, July 18, 2011

Another week, another rewrite

It is also worth noting the irony of so much moral outrage devoted to a single media company, when British tabloids have been known for decades for buying scoops and digging up dirt on the famous. Fleet Street in general has long had a well-earned global reputation for the blind-quote, single-sourced story that may or may not be true. The understandable outrage in this case stems from the hacking of a noncelebrity, the murder victim Milly Dowler.
No, the understandable outrage in this case stems from the hacking of a murder victim, the noncelebrity Milly Dowler. See, it's not that difficult: you just change the word order, again. The fact of Milly Dowler's non-celebrity status, as noted previously, is as nothing to the fact that she was a murder victim, who was still missing at the time of the hacking.

But wait, there's more:
We also trust that readers can see through the commercial and ideological motives of our competitor-critics. The Schadenfreude is so thick you can't cut it with a chainsaw. Especially redolent are lectures about journalistic standards from publications that give Julian Assange and WikiLeaks their moral imprimatur. They want their readers to believe, based on no evidence, that the tabloid excesses of one publication somehow tarnish thousands of other News Corp. journalists across the world.
Let's rewrite that last sentence:
They want their readers to believe, based on steaming piles of incriminating evidence, that the criminal acts of at least one publication reflect the values of the most senior News Corp executives across the world.
See, that wasn't difficult, was it?