The front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which arrived on my driveway:
Man, you have to love the artistry in the headline JOBLESS FATHER IS KILLED AFTER BANK IS ROBBED. When an armed robber menaces bank tellers and guards with a shotgun and then points it at responding police officers, it’s important to remove all assignment of blame from the robber and build a morally neutral headline. If anyone is to blame, it’s obviously George W. Bush, whose faltering economy and job destruction has led honorable fathers to desperate acts. I guess the editor who concocted this headline was being even handed in not blaring POLICE GUN DOWN JOBLESS FATHER AFTER BANK IS ROBBED.
That, friends, is a work of art in passive voice.
I notice that the online recreation of the front page looks different:
JOBLESS FATHER IS KILLED AFTER ROBBING BANK still runs a little sympathetic for the bank robber. The headline for the online story isn’t much better: Robber is killed outside bank, police say, which uses the “authority figures allege” asterisk to show that the crusading headline writers at the Post-Dispatch won’t be duped into thinking that a man with a shotgun and a bagful of money coming out of a bank is anything but a victim of oppression by a heartless police force/society/something other than his own bad choices.
