writhaus

While looking over the morning headlines, I noticed that JP Morgan had initiated buying Bear Stearns for $2 per share. I read the Associated Press article via Yahoo.

As I read the article, I noticed this passage:

Something with that tickled the back of my mind, but it was early, so I let it go. I continued reading and crossed this passage:

Then I realized why that earlier passage bothered me. World War I ended in 1918, about five years before Bear Stearns was founded. But then, I thought, how did something that is pretty basic like this slip through? I mean, I am not a professional and I noticed it, and this story had two writers plus (I’m guessing) an editor go over it, right?

Oh, two other reporters contributed to the story. Think back to May of 2003. There was a lot of controversy going on in the newspaper business because people were doing reporting for other reporters and were not being given credit. New York Times contributer and Pulitzer winner Rick Bragg lost his job over it. It was a common practice, I think. I’ve seen reporters huddle together to flesh out a story because each reporter has sources the other needs. I’ve seen more senior reporters help a tyro journo rewrite their story, too. The question is how much do other reporters need to contribute before they get credit for writing some of the story.

At any rate, did one of these two helper journalists add in the inaccurate statement? There really isn’t any way for us to know, but there are at least four AP writers who need a basic 20th century history class or at least an internet connection to Wikipedia.

writhaus.com wishes you and yours a merry Christmas and a joyful holiday season.

We also vote Charley Pride - Christmas in My Hometown as the greatest Christmas album ever produced, if you were wondering.

What’s red and silver and runs into walls?
A baby with forks in its eyes.

How do you kill a blue monster?
Shoot him with a blue-monster gun.

How do you kill a red monster?
Hold his nose until he turns blue. Then, shoot him with a blue-monster gun.

These two sequences have something in common. They are both jokes. Should I be banned from the Internet for publishing them here? Given the outrage over Don Imus’ one-shot joke about what inner-city kids look like, some people probably think so.

The Oxford American Dictionary defines humor as “the condition of being amusing or comic (less intellectual and more sympathetic than wit).” That means humor is lowbrow, comparatively speaking. Lowbrow humor turns on the bawdry and the offensive. Have you ever heard Larry the Cable Guy? He’s funny and pretty lowbrow. Andrew “Dice” Clay made a living off lowbrow humor in the late ’80s and early ’90s before trying to go more mainstream. Imus had intellectual content while generously dipping into the lowbrow whenever he felt like it.

Lindsay Leupelt doesn’t think that’s an excuse for what he said, but she can see where someone might use such a “tasteless, rude, ignorant, and uncalled-for comment.” She understands why he was fired. There’s been a lot of bad press after all. She understands and can appreciate tasteless jokes, though: “A joke is supposed to be funny, not a hidden way of taking a stab at someone. Also, don’t intentionally say rude, vulgar [things].”

In Newsweek, NBC’s David Gregory said, “Imus was living in two worlds. There was the risqué, sexually offensive, sometimes racially offensive, satire, and then there was this political salon about politics and books. Some of us tuned in to one part and tuned out the other … Whether I was numb to the humor that offended people or in denial, I don’t know.”

I think most of the time, people just got the joke. In 1729, England went crazy when Jonathan Swift published “A Modest Proposal,” in which he suggested the cure for Irish hunger was cannibalism. Educated people might have gotten the satire, but the general public was clueless.

That isn’t to say what Imus said was satire or on the same level as Swift — or even South Park, our modern day equivalent. Jokes are jokes, though. People tend to get upset when it should just roll off their backs. Political correctness has infected our world so strongly that we are becoming incapable of filtering anything out. The end result of that quite possibly could be frightening. Even Rosie O’Donnell is afraid of the thought police.

One thing is for certain, says Leupelt: “This week was a waste of time,” and the time could have been better spent “getting [the troops] home.”