How Today’s New York Times Politics Desk Would Cover Historical Events, Ranked

America's Best Newspaper, Says New York Times

8/3/24 Clever Name Here dba "Black Rod" 21

1. Despite Concern Over Rhetoric And Tanks, Hitler’s Strong Leadership Catches On In France, Belgium, Poland, Netherlands, Denmark and Austria

2. ‘It’s Our Way Of Life’: Lincoln’s Divisive Proposal Polls Poorly Among Southern Voters

3. Anti-Colonial Indian Militant Ghandi Violently Attacks British Ruling Class In Speech

4.  Anti-British Militants Die Following Attack On Soldier In Boston

5. Doctors Say Avoiding Covid Is Important. So Why Does Public Perception Differ?

6. Magician Fred Kaps Wows Crowd in ‘Ed Sullivan’ Appearance Amid Unruly Shrieking For British Rock Quartet

7. Islam Declares War On Freedom, America

8. Visit To Theresienstadt Highlights Lack of Evidence In ‘Death Camp’ Claims

9. Lucy Loved, But Polling Shows Ricky Ricardo Is True Star Of Show

10. Northern Aggressors Repelled From Fort Sumter In Valiant Defense Of Homeland, Confederacy Says

11. Aggressive Martin Luther King Jr. Says He Has A Dream; Public Perceives It As More Of A Nightmare

12. Women Often Victims Of Violence From Men, Women Say

13. Dangerous Japs To Be Rounded Up, Put In Camps For Duration Of War; GOP Demands More To Secure Borders

14. Scientists Say Earth Is Round. So Why Does It Feel So Flat?

15. Columbus Lands At Guanahani, Provides New Careers For Residents

16. Valiant St. Louis Cardinals Fall Short In 2004 World Series Bid, Losing Series In Game 4 

17. Anti-Tobacco Scientists Say Smoking Is Unhealthy, But Cigarette Executives Say Claims Overblown

18. Reasons For Titanic’s Sinking Remain Unclear As Some Question Iceberg’s Role

19. Roman Forces Quell Uprising Concerns Caused By Jewish Street Preacher’s Militant Followers

20. Police Say Gun Functions Perfectly During President-Involved Shooting In Dallas

21. Generals Say Great War Could Be Won If Troops Were Braver Leaving Trenches

22. Senate’s Concerns About Dictatorship ‘Overblown’ Says Caesar As He Crosses River Rubicon With Army

23. Vaccine Arrives, But Is Polio That Dangerous For Most People?

24. Nixon Adopts Softer Tone As Democrats Claim His Tactics Went Too Far At Watergate Hotel

25. Saigon Falls Amid Anti-War Protests on U.S. Campuses

26. Iraqi Weapons Of Mass Destruction May Include Death Ray, Evil Mechanized Spiders Say New York Times Sources

27. Thousands Of Children Claim Abuse But Priests, Church Say Nothing Happened

28. President Says Hurricane Katrina Came Out Of Nowhere But Confirms Help On The Way Even If City ‘Looks Pretty Nice’ Underwater

29. Blacks Say Racism Behind Lower Wealth, Housing Inequalities, Fewer Opportunities, But These Trump Voters Disagree

30. Getting Hit By A Bus? Less Dangerous Than You Think

31. NASA Confirms Moon-Involved Rocket Incident

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About Clever Name Here dba "Black Rod" 211 Articles
Vell, Clever Name Here just zis guy, you know? Sometimes funny. Often annoyed. Once I saw a blimp.

21 Comments

  3. This is a tour de force. I kept thinking, “oh, yes, that one”, then there was the next, and the next. It is not possible to pick a favorite, but 6, 12, 18, and 31 were very good.

  5. That really captures how badly they mangle basic English so much of the time.

    For an actual headline and subhed, take this example:

    As Trump Prosecutions Move Forward, Threats and Concerns Increase

    As criminal cases proceed against the former president, heated rhetoric and anger among his supporters have the authorities worried about the risk of political dissent becoming deadly.

    Where’s the subject in the headline? Why is the subhed so badly written?

    One reason they produce this soup so often is that they’re trying to avoid assigning responsibility where it belongs.

    This kind of tangled syntax is also a common affectation of mediocre writers. They think it conveys subtlety where it just conveys confusion. They think it suggests craftsmanship where it just screams out sloppiness.

    The Times notoriously eliminated their public editor position in 2017, but they also eliminated separate copy editor positions that year. And while the reason for dumping copy editors has generally been attributed to cost cutting, I think the execs also had a similar problem with both copy editors and the public editor.

    The content editors thought they knew best. They were sick and tired of being told what to do.

    And if they wanted to spew run-on sentences and stop naming people responsible for bad things, well….

    Would run-on sentence spewing for the sake of responsibility assignment authority establishment receiving given would it be for their having? Despite questioning existing, run-on sentence spewing authority would be seen as proving value moving forward for provoking of thought in future time shortly!

    • Indirect phrasing is ALWAYS indicative of trying to avoid assigning or accepting blame. ‘Mistakes were made’ is a prime example.

      This is another perfect example: As Trump Prosecutions Move Forward, Threats and Concerns Increase

      What it should say: Trump Supporters Threaten Justice Officials During His Prosecution.

      That clearly points out the people who are responsible for the threats, which is why NYT won’t do it.

      • I think in other cases reporters and editors use weird indirect language because they just don’t know what they’re even trying to do.

        You’ll see them run stories about the US border along the lines of “Rising Tensions Amid Possible Fears of…” and once you read them, you realize they don’t actually know what they’re talking about.

        They feel like they need to meet a quota of border stories, but they have nothing but a collection of unconnected anecdotes. They have a quote from a Republican and a quote from a Democrat, but neither has anything to do with the other. They don’t have any recent or significant statistics.

        In that situation, they just punt, grab a few nouns, verbs and adjectives out of a bag, string them together, and hope for the best.

         

        • …part of it is that their grab bag of terms is laden with…I guess you could call it legacy SEO terminology given it tends to lag behind your bleeding edge in click bait terms

          …there’s probably a lesson to be learned in there somewhere about the difference between broad & wide in terms of coverage…after all we call the thin sort a veneer…& those aren’t known for their depth…unless we’re talking about a proper shellacking?

    • …sometimes breaking the rules of syntax can be its own sort of alchemy…to boldly go is a split infinitive…but everybody gets the reference so the fact is that fuck up helped it be a singular bit of phrasing that is just about synonymous with a franchise brand

      …the collateral damage to people understanding it’s a mistake to split an infinitive…that part might be hard to quantify so mostly they avoid the whole charge

      …so…sometimes a really good headline is more poetry than prose & you can bend a few rules

      …to your point, though…this one is more or less a direct horse/cart substitution…the answer to your question is obvious if you swap the clauses back around to foreground the subject

      Threats and Concerns Increase, As Trump Prosecutions Move Forward

      …& once that part is straight…the subheading paraphrases out as “the thing you might be mainly interested in but isn’t the focus of this piece has developed since last time you checked in ways that may well have potentially historic significance…but instead the thing you’ve clicked on prefers to focus on the fact that the jan 6th effect is…uh…still in effect”

      …it’s…well, lazy is certainly one word for it…not least since the sub also pulls a clause to the front that arguably doesn’t belong there in a standard grammatical construction…but if you squint just right it’s almost upfront about the redirect it’s all about?

      • Even that doesn’t assign blame, though. Threats don’t make themselves. Concern doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Even reversing the order still avoids naming the people causing the problems.

        • …for sure…but if they wanted to talk about things with that kind of clarity of purpose they wouldn’t have picked just the concerns themselves to be their subject…& their objective to be magnifying them…”on both sides” no less

          …it’s nothing if not chickenshit at the end of the day…or the beginning…since that’s mostly when the headlines land?

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