When I wrote for newspapers, there were times I wanted to do unspeakable things to whoever wrote the titles. Sometimes those lead-ins had little or nothing to do with what I wrote. Or they made the reader think my article was slanted in a way it wasn’t.
I was reminded of those experiences when I came across a Fox News item about Olympic bike race mishaps in Paris. Some had to do with the road conditions themselves, as I mentioned in a previous piece. Others were a result of the rain that plagued the opening ceremony and first few days of the games.
Jackson Thompson’s report is actually good: He sticks to describing the conditions I mentioned and riders’ experiences. It doesn’t seem to betray the anti-bike bias one might expect from the network.
But its headline does: “Paris streets littered by bicycle crashes during Olympics triathlon amid wet conditions.”
Now, I realize that “littered” is used to mean “full of,” “covered with” or “scattered.” But using it in the context of “streets” implies another of the word’s meanings: strewn about like trash or debris.
Could it be that Fox News’ headline writer though Mr. Thompson wasn’t toeing the company’s explicit or covert line?
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