DISQUS

Vickie Pynchon · 1 year ago

Ridiculous, of course, to accuse Palin of supporting Hamas and no one would believe it scanning their news reader of RSS feeds; the more interesting issue, of course, is a question posed to Palin that she didn't answer in the debate and that is -- do you want to promote democracy in countries without checks on the "tyranny of the majority," i.e., a Constitution and Bill of Rights that protects the interests of the minority. More to the point, let's assume a democracy in a country WITHOUT a minority needing protecting but the unanimous "will of the people" is to, say, "wipe Israel off the face of the earth." Let's just agree that "spreading democracy" is not the complete answer to the question. Tolerance, justice, abiding by a reasonable international rule of law (something that's been missing in the U.S. for the past 8 years), etc. What Palin demonstrated is that Miss America is capable of learning the buzzwords & can serve as a folksy talking head. Would be a disaster to have her actually BE President in event of McCain critical illness, incapacity or death. Having thought this through, I'm assuming a President Palin would be a puppet for people we don't know who will actually be running the administrative branch of the government. A Palin presidency would, I assume, be a shadow government.

esqmarty · 1 year ago

Folks, I have the ability to edit comments, and normally I would like
comments to be on-topic, which in this case is the speech/libel analysis.
But I will let people vent in this instance on the following condition: no
vulgarity and no name calling. Having said that, I would prefer that the
comments concern themselves with the speech/libel analysis.

Vickie Pynchon · 1 year ago

More to your question; I don't believe anyone takes headlines to be straight assertions of fact. They are necessarily telegraphic. The article must be read to give meaning to the headline. Headlines are, of course, not written by the authors of articles, but by headline writers trained and experienced in "grabbing" the attention of the reader; any regular reader of the news knows that he is being invited into the story by the headline, not being TOLD the story by the headline. The one thing headlines are NOT is factual. They are the carney barker. I don't think they can be libelous when read in context and I don't think reasonable people can take them to be factual in the absence of the article they're trying to get the customer to come on in and read.

Curious Texan · 1 year ago

VICKIE PYNCHON IS AN IDIOT

I personally think that out of courtesy to the reader, so as not to waste his or her time, headlines should reflect the contents of an article as accurately as possible. There are inadvertent exceptions to this, due to the paucity of morphemes in the English language. Case in point is the headline of a Vietnam-era article describing how General Hershey would not allow a demostration to be staged in front of Selective Service headquarters. The headline "Hershey Bars Protest" (singular noun-verb-singular noun) had nothing to do with a political action staged by chocolate (adjective-plural noun-verb), but it's reasonable to assume that the author of the headline did not intend to deceive.

If time is money (and in the legal profession that's certainly the case), a misleading headline could be tantamount to fraud. Relief should be calculated based on the billing rate of the reader and the length of the article.

That being said, I really don't think that Vickie Pynchon is an idiot; in fact, I've never even met Ms. Pynchon. I was merely using my provocative headline as "the carney barker." Based on her previous comment, I hope I can assume that she won't be suing me any time soon.

But just to be sure, I'm posting this pseudonymously. :)