Striking Distance

I really loathe the SF Chronicle. It's the forced sense of cheery camraderie they add to every story. In some way, I suppose it's meant to make you think of the reporter as your next door neighbor, dressed in a bathrobe, leaning on your fence, cup of coffee in hand, pointing across the street at your suspicious neighbors and listing the juicy gossip of the morning.

Case in point: The SF Chronicle is running a story about Marcus Wesson, the polygamist and suspected mass-murderer, wherein they refer to him as a "man with [a] striking personality." He may have murdered nine people, all family members, and the SF Chronicle thinks the most important thing we need to know about him is that he had a striking personality?

Imagine the SFC tackling "dynamic and enthusiastic overachiever" Jeffrey Dahmer or "charming former painter" Adolph Hitler. Brrrr.

Give me my inverse-pyramid journalism any day of the week; just tell me who, what, where, when, why, and how. Leave the humanization bits for the biographers.

(LJ thinks my link to Darren Hanlon's cool song Punk's Not Dead is too long to fit in the Current Music spot. Fascists.)