Breaking News! GNB “edits” stories
Published: November 11, 2005
Good News Blog is a truth in advertisement kind of thing. Common everyday news is good.
And we report it as it is. Straight from the horse’s mouth. No editing. We don’t see the world through pink sun glasses and hey, sometimes some bad news comes with the good, right?
But honesty forces me to for the first time ever reveal here that, yes, Good News Blog does edit the stories it publishes.
Oi….
Yup.
See, we have to remove double quotes. A lot of them.
“Say what?”
Double quotes. Those thingies you make in the air with the fingers of both hands when you say that Johnny is a “brilliant” student, paying taxes is “wonderful”, or that politics is an “honest” job.
Double quotes are what keep you away from a butcher selling “fresh” meat or from a service offering “free” consultation.
Why? Well, double quotes have a “nasty” habbit of disclaiming what just has been said. One doesn’t really believe it and so, rather than saying it yourself, you attribute it to someone else. Because you wouldn’t want to be “caught” lying….
You’re “losing” me here
What in the world has this got to do with good news, you wonder.
It has to do with all those stories that talk about a “miracle”. Or a “hero”. (Washington Times; Parks remembered as a ‘hero’ … you mean we actually remember her as something else?)
Headlines that read “miracle” escape as woman survives 3 floor fall or “miracle” baby survives operation.
It is as if it isn’t so. No harm done there - but for two things.
First, these stories usually are what we call miraculous. We don’t have to think divine intervention, angel choirs and flashes of white light; more often than not we think of a miracle as an “an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment” (Merriam-Webster).
When a man stops breathing for 10 minutes, comes back to life and has no brain damage whatsoever - that’s a miracle!
A two year old kid who falls in front of a speeding train and he survives unharmed? You guessed it: miracle.
Go ahead, browse through the miracle stories, pick an example and see if it is a “miracle” or a miracle
Equal treatment
The double quote statement of unbelief doesn’t befall bad news. What would you think of headlines like “devestating” war, “horrific” murder, “terrible” accident, or “Hurrinca” Katrina.
See, that’s what I’m talking about; it’s not a truth in advertisement kind of thing. It’s a “miracle” but never a “disaster”. Someone is a criminal, a thief, but at best a “hero”.
So what we do at Good News Blog is we get real. We remove those double quotes. We edit them out. Delete them. And by doing so we’re telling it like it is; miracle, hero, amazing, fantastic, breakthrough.
Recommended: Gallery of “Misused” Quotation Marks
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