Friday, November 09, 2007

No Quotation Marks No Quote: Steve, Hack, Janke it is just that Simple

This was the Toronto Star's headline today. "PM to Cities: Drop Dead"

As Red Tory pointed out the above was in reference to a 1975 headline. http://redtory.blogspot.com/2007/11/leave-it-to-beaver.html#links Just to note, Red did get a little carried away though. Half the blogsphere was not born in 1975.

"Any barely sentient person should be aware that the deliberately provocative headline in the Toronto Star (and faithfully repurposed for the web by the good folks at National Newswatch) was quite obviously a direct knock-off of the infamous headline “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” that was run by the Daily News in 1975 regarding the bankruptcy of New York City government and the refusal of President Gerald Ford to provide financial assistance."

Naturally Tory Hack Angry, and what Conservative is not?, in the great White North lost his pretty little head. http://stevejanke.com/archives/246088.php

"Actually, attributing words to someone that we never actually said could be grounds for legal action if those words cast that person in a poor light."

This was the headline: PM to Cities: Drop Dead http://www.members.shaw.ca/nspector4/clip_image2001.jpg
Do you see quotes? I do not see any quotes. Therefore the Star was not attributing any specific words to Harper. It is just that simple. If they were attributing a quote to Harper this is how it would have read: PM to Cities: "Drop Dead"

4 comments:

wilson said...

Hmmmmm...you call for Dion to roll out policy, he does, and you post about 'Drop Dead'.
Dion, upstaged by a headline about Harper...

Koby said...

I am delighted they finally rolled some policy. However, there was no much new there. It certainly was not "bold". What was "bold" was proposing that Canada set poverty targets.

This is what I said yesterday on Far and wide.

"while I am glad the Liberals are moving ahead with something, I am weary as to how much of a political impact this is going to make. The Liberals seem not to realize that the public has the ability to talk about only a narrow band of policies with any degree of sophistication and I am afraid child poverty is way beyond the ability of most columnists to talk about yet alone the public. Good policy or not, the public will not be interested in what it can not understand.

The NDP’s push to abolish the senate is kind of idea the public can get its head around and will talk about. It is also the very kind of cut and dry issues the Liberals need to bring to the table politically. SSM, marijuana legalization, whether to join the US in Iraq, whether to leave Afghanistan, whether to abolish the senate, euthanasia, whether to mandate more vacation time, whether to abolish the monarchy, whether to ban hand guns, whether to cut the GST. These are the kind of issues virtually everyone can offer an opinion on. Only a small fraction of the public is in any kind of position to pass judgment on whether doing x will reduce child poverty or whether the Liberals carbon trading plan will help reduce emissions."

This what I said today on Steve's blog.

"Sadly, Dion's "bold" proposal got as much press as I thought it would. No press == no much impact.

The Mulroney annoucment stole all the headlines and guess that is what it was designed to do."

Platty said...

Then why did the Star yank the headline?? Just an innocent headline, right? Guess they thought otherwise....

Koby said...

"Then why did the Star yank the headline?? Just an innocent headline, right? Guess they thought otherwise...."

Dolts like you were not able to understand it.

Look, headline change all the time.