Hey, Review-Journal: This guy's not a huckster

A front-page article in the Sunday, December 9, 2018 edition of the Las Vegas Review-Journal carries the headline, “Holidays ripe for hucksters of false charity.” Above the headline is a photo of a man named James Liebmann ringing the bell for the Salvation Army outside a local grocery store.

Given the juxtaposition of the “huckster” headline and the photo, one might conclude Mr. Liebmann is a huckster. Not so. He’s a legitimate Salvation Army bell ringer, and apparently a very nice guy. Unfortunately, one must read several paragraphs and go to the “jump” of the article on page 6A before it becomes clear that he’s not a huckster.

The article goes on to describe various holiday charity scams and gives advice on spotting them. While it’s a well-written and useful article, the photo caption should have clarified that Mr. Liebmann is one of the good guys.

Hey, Huffington Post, ever see a non-deadly killing?

A Nov. 30 article in the Huffington Post raises an interesting question: "Is there such a thing as a non-deadly killing?" The article tells the tragic story of three teenagers, two from California and one from Mexico, who were killed execution-style in Tijuana, Mexico.  By all accounts the victims were nice young men. The article can be found here.

The article is informative and well-written, but down in the text, one finds the following sentence: "The teens’ murders came in addition to four other deadly killings in Tijuana last weekend."

Huh? I thought all killings were deadly. Am I missing something? The author of the article is listed as David Lohr. His bio on the Huffington Post says he's a former senior investigative crime writer for CourtTV's Crime Library and has been writing about crime and criminals for nearly 20 years. He must have written about a lot of deadly killings in that time.

Hey, Las Vegas Sun, what caused those wrecks??

A new stretch of highway designated as Interstate 11 opened last summer near Las Vegas. It bypasses a long-standing bottleneck in Boulder City and shortens the time for a trip from Vegas to Hoover Dam or the Grand Canyon.

Within the first few weeks of the opening there were three accidents claiming four lives. The Las Vegas Sun reported on these wrecks on Sept. 16 under a headline, “String of crashes on new stretch of Interstate 11 spurs concern.” The headline made me wonder if there was some serious problem with the design of the new road.

One would naturally be curious as to the cause of the wrecks. The article quotes a state transportation official as saying the crashes were the result of driver error, but nowhere in the article does the reporter (Mick Akers) tell his readers the details.

Here’s what The Sun reported:

“On Aug. 14, a two-vehicle crash left two men dead. On Aug. 28, a two-vehicle crash left two dead and three injured. On Sept. 6, a four-vehicle crash, including two semi-trucks, resulted in three injuries.”

Here’s what The Sun didn't report:

• In the first wreck, a driver made a U-turn into oncoming traffic.
• In the second wreck, a vehicle left the road and hit a car parked on the shoulder. It was 2:20 a.m. The driver whose car left the road was charged with DUI.
• In the third wreck, a tractor-trailer crashed into traffic that was backed up from an earlier wreck, at about 2 a.m.

These are salient facts that would greatly improve a reader's understanding, but The Sun didn't include them. The front page of The Sun boasts, “A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Newspaper,” referring to an award about 10 years ago. Now if an old man in his jammies can find these facts with about five minutes of Google searching, don’t you think a reporter for “A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Newspaper” could do the same? Apparently not.

Great analysis, Associated Press. By the way, what was the score??

One of journalism’s most venerable clichés is the one about the sportswriter who produces a brilliant analysis of a game but doesn’t tell the final score. That’s what happens when a reporter tries to show how smart he or she is but forgets to report the basics. Associated Press reporter Emily Wagster Pettus fell into this trap with an article published Nov. 28, 2018.

The article reports the results of a Mississippi U.S. Senate runoff election in which Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith defeated Democrat Mike Espy. The race drew national attention over a remark by Hyde-Smith that could be viewed as racially offensive. The article includes a review of Hyde-Smith’s controversial remark, quotes from the winner, the loser, and President Trump, and various other background information, but there’s nary a mention of the vote total in the version published in my hometown newspaper. Nor was the vote total given in the version posted on the AP web site early that morning. Fortunately for the AP, their editors caught the oversight several hours after the article was first released and inserted the vote count in the online version. https://www.apnews.com/b7d5dfadd2b44d3da537376ff57d7ff4

Two other Associated Press writers, Jeff Amy and Janet McConnaughey, contributed to the article. Between these three ace reporters, didn’t one of them think to ask, “Hey, what was the vote count?” Didn't the editors who first reviewed the article ask that question? You’d expect this type of amateurish reporting from a small-town newspaper, but not the Associated Press, which bills itself “The definitive source for news.”

Tiger vs. Phil: Shadow Ridge? Shadow Creek? Whatever!

Las Vegas is a big stage, so when Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson came to town to play a head-to-head golf match on Nov. 23 it was big news. The morning after Phil got the better of Tiger in a playoff, the Las Vegas Review-Journal (R-J) had a great front-page photo of the two golfers on the course under a headline that said, “Shadow Ridge Showdown,” and a caption referring to the match at “Shadow Ridge Golf Course.”

But there was a slight problem. The match was played at Shadow CREEK Golf Course. The mistake is perfectly understandable. Shadow Creek, owned by MGM, is an ultra-exclusive, hoity-toity playground for the rich, the famous, and the high rollers. The name “Shadow Creek” is not commonly used in the R-J, especially since Michael Jordan no longer holds an annual celebrity charity golf event there. “Shadow Ridge,” however, is frequently in the news in Vegas, as Shadow Ridge is a local high school and probably familiar to newsroom staffers. Who knows, maybe the headline writer has a kid who attends school there. It’s easy to see how someone could make the transposition. To their credit, the R-J fessed up with a correction the next day and fixed the error in their archived editions.

We all make slips of the tongue (or keyboard) like this. The most famous may have been at the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York when the party’s presidential nominee, Jimmy Carter, paid a top-of-his-lungs tribute to that great Democrat statesman, Hubert Horatio HORNBLOWER. Of course, he meant to say Hubert Horatio HUMPHREY, the progressive Senator from Minnesota and Vice President under LBJ. Horatio Hornblower was a fictional British naval officer in novels by C.S.Forester.

It could have been worse for the R-J. I remember back in the 1990s when the Tri-City Herald newspaper in Washington State ran a front-page, post-election headline: “Kennewick Voters Approve Pubic Safety Tax.” Of course, it should have been “public safety.” But pubic safety sounds like a good idea, too.