While I’d never try to find the light side in the horrific tornados that scraped across the southern U.S. last week, I can’t let one story I read pass without comment. The story made reference to one of the Alabama communities that was devastated.
One line in the story read: Neighborhoods there were leveled by a massive tornado caught on video by a tower-mounted news camera that barreled through late Wednesday afternoon.
Did you catch what jarred my brain?
The way the sentence is structured, the destruction in the town was caused by a news camera, not an F4 or F5 tornado: “ … a tower-mounted news camera that barreled through …” I suppose I could be forgiving if it were a small-town reporter cranking out a story about his or her hometown, pushed along by a deadline. But the story was filed 24 hours after the storm — by an Associated Press reporter, for crying out loud! Have we reached the point where even AP doesn’t edit its feeds?
I’ll temper my fury with something much lighter. One local newspaper topped a story with the headline “Bizarre Fundraiser.” I dove into the story to see what sort of peculiar money-grabbing idea was being described, only to discover that the fundraiser was in fact a bazaar. Didn’t sound like a particularly strange bazaar, either.