BBC Headline from the iPhone app today:
Motorists warned of ice ‘hazard’
Problems with this headline are:
Quotation in Headline
No Shit Sherlock
Quotation in Headline
Normally the weasels at the BBC use a quotation so they can state anything they want in the headline. Get some whacko to spout off: “them there aliens have stolen my memory and taken body probe photos for their files” and you can use it in your headline. You don’t really have to ask someone outside the office. Just ask the journalist next to you and claim them as a “source”. Now in this case the word HAZARD is in quotations. Does that mean that the conditions aren’t really hazardous? Or does it mean that the level of hazardness is open to some form of personal interpretation? Is ice on the roads considered a hazard or not? What knobs they are – these headline writers.
No Shit Sherlock
We have had snow reports for about a week now and the Met Office were lovely and accurate (or rather chaos didn’t interfere!). We have known it was going to be cold. You only have to look out of the window to see snow and frozen paths. Isn’t it a bit obvious that the roads might be icy too? My car shows me the outside temperature when I have the electrics turned on. Could the negative sign before the numbers mean something important? How about that funny snowflake symbol I see on the dashboard whenever it’s really cold? I hate how much the obvious needs to be stated to make people think.