“My” local daily paper – The West Australian – has recently become relentlessly parochial and adopted inane journalese as its house style.
Its headlines especially grate: almost all are prime examples of what smug dullards consider “clever”, of what twits mistake for wit.
The West‘s editor may or may not be a bona fide idiot; perhaps he is just a bright young lickspittle, fulfilling a brief to “dumb everything down, cut every cost and cross-promote the linked TV station, endlessly”.
So, it was a particular joy/relief to encounter some actual journalistic flair…
One of the Leaders (editorials) in the March 30th-April 5th 2019 edition of The Economist is headlined “Trump Resurgent”.
These are its first two sentences:
Robert Mueller toiled over his report for two years, slightly longer than it took Herman Melville to write “Moby Dick”. Going by a summary provided by the attorney-general, though, the endings are the same: the whale gets away.
Click here to read the full piece.
(re: the photo. No, they’re not white whales, but somehow orcas are more Trump-appropriate. After more than 64 orca-less years, I at last saw so-called “killer whales” in the wild, on the early evening of March 24, from New Zealand’s Otago Peninsula. More of the Otago Peninsula soon, on Pelican Yoga)