Today’s post involves a more current story, taken from this past Monday’s online edition of the Washington Post, about a man who was beaten near a Portland BLM protest: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/17/truck-crash-protest-assault/#comments-wrapper
It’s a story that’s still evolving (and which seems pretty complicated), but I’m not going to focus at all on trying to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong, or how it all turned out. What I want to look at is how this particular story is a good example of three writing techniques that can completely derail a news story:
burying a lede (“hiding the most important and relevant pieces of a story within other distracting information,” per Merriam-Webster),
the use of unverified speculation or gossip, and
including unrelated facts to imply a correlation
Sometimes journalists do some of these things by accident, because they are inexperienced. Sometimes they do them on purpose – they are subtle but unmistakable ways of manipulating a story to fit a preconceived narrative. Either way, the end result is always the same: the facts of the story are obscured.
Let’s start with the headline:
Man seriously injured in attack after crashing his truck during Black Lives Matter protest in Portland
Right off the bat, I’m curious as to why the headline is so long, and particularly why the “crashing his truck” part is there. That use of the active voice with relation to the driver of the truck does something interesting – it very quietly makes the reader feel like the driver intentionally did something to incite the attack against him. That may or may not be true – at this point we’ve only read the headline. But it’s something to note. I’m also curious about the use of the word “protest.” Is this a group protesting BLM? Or is it a pro-BLM group, protesting something else? This definitely needs to be clarified.
The opening line is almost identical to the story’s title, with the addition of two pieces of information: “protestors beat him after he crashed his truck on a downtown sidewalk.”
So now we know who did the attacking – the “protestors.” But there’s also that same, interesting thing happening again with regards to the driver; now we know that he didn’t just crash his truck, he “crashed his truck on a downtown sidewalk.” What’s the first thought that comes into your head when you think of someone actively driving on to a sidewalk? Mine is: Wow - that man was trying to run down the protestors by driving on the sidewalk. Now I really read on because I want to know more.
The second paragraph finally gives us some factual information about the incident – where it happened, what time of day it happened, and where it was in relation to the BLM event. I get a little distracted here by the use of the word “rally,” which has a totally different, more positive connotation from the word “protest,” which is what the author has used so far. But I’m going to set that aside, because, finally, in the next paragraph – after two previous paragraphs and a video - we get some pretty important information that should have gone immediately up top:
According to “the report” (unsure what kind of report this is, but my best guess is it’s a police report or transcript from a 911 call), that driver, who allegedly actively crashed his car may have actually been being chased by the “protestors” when he crashed. THIS is a buried lede.
The next five paragraphs give us all the additional, pertinent information on the event that a proper news story should. The one I find most interesting is paragraph #4:
This notes – rightly – that the police released this “additional information Monday afternoon,” which is likely after this story was originally published. Still, the beauty of online news stories is that they can be – and often are – edited to reflect significant changes and developments in a story as they occur, especially when those developments seem to contradict the original information presented to the reader (editors just make a note at the bottom, saying that the story was edited at a later date).
I know for sure that editors and writers get busy and they cannot always stay on top of things like this – there are so many news stories happening all the time and they are all constantly evolving. But what disappoints me about this story is that clearly someone went to the trouble to add that “Monday afternoon” paragraph in to the piece at a later time, so it’s not unrealistic to expect that they could just as easily have put the newly pertinent information up top where it belongs. I really wanted to give the WaPo the benefit of the doubt on this one, but that decision makes me feel like a conscious choice was made to bury this info where it is.
The final two paragraphs do not help this story’s cause. Never mind that the first sentence of this end section includes the words: “rumors” and “although no evidence to support those claims has surfaced” – both huge red flags that the information presented within is unverified speculation at best and gossip at worst (neither one belongs in a hard news story). The final two sentences of the piece also do not belong:
They are both facts, yes (well, sort of – the first one about the far-right extremists seems to be based on an allegation… which is basically speculation). But, as presented, they are both essentially unrelated to this story.
The second-to-last sentence, about far-right extremists, may be true but, without a factual supporting statement for proof, like I discussed last week (something like: three other people had driven up on sidewalks during Saturday afternoon’s extremist event), it is simply an unrelated event, and is likely meant to evoke feelings of anger and disgust from the reader.
And the final sentence of the story, about a separate driver, whose truck “accelerated toward a crowd” 13 days earlier, implies that this behavior is part of a disturbing pattern. It also finally explains the gut feelings I had initially, that the writer was subtly trying to imply that this particular truck driver crashed on to the sidewalk on purpose.
The only problem? This story already told us that “the report said protestors were chasing the truck before it crashed.” So, aside from the fact that there were trucks involved in both incidents, they are not really indicative of a pattern at all (at least, not given the facts as they have been presented to us in this story). For some reason, though, someone who wrote or edited this story wants us to think they are. Why?
This was an article that I just skimmed [I subscribe to the WP online] so I really didn't notice all these points. Thank you. Time to slow down when I read the 'news'.