6.12.2003

Silly, silly Washington Times

Washington is still very much a 1.5-newspaper town.

Exhibit Q: A story called "Mayor tries raining taxpayer bucks to lure baseball" is played like a news story on the paper's website, but features this as a lead:

Mayor Anthony A. Williams appears willing to stand on his head and count to 100 if it results in the city securing the nomadic Montreal Expos.
OK, but I'm holding y'all to this: if Tony doesn't stand on his head and count to 100, I'm suing for libel.

Exhibit 14: We are blessed with a second consecutive day of Jen Waters articles, in which she makes good use of her Encyclopedia Britannica:

Along with identifying the approximate 30,000 genes in human DNA, scientists in the Human Genome Project also wanted to determine the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA. DNA is made up of four similar chemicals — adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine — which are abbreviated A, T, C and G.
The end of the piece says "For more information about the exhibit, contact the Smithsonian Web site (www.si.edu/exhibitions/)." Contact a website? You know they don't, like, talk back, right?

Exhibit pi: A story on the Philips Collection buying an adjacent apartment building and evicting its tenants features this sentence:

Once an agreement was reached, neighbors said some tenants had began vacating their apartments.
Had they? Had some tenants began vacating?

My new slogan for the Times: "Sloppy seconds."

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