Most people don’t really know what a newspaper editor does. They have the notion that he sits at his desk sucking on his pencil thinking of ways to push a “progressive agenda” in his next issue.
OK, well, that IS actually what most of them do. But down the line, where people called copy editors toil on the copy desk, they’re supposed to do some other things, like make stories make sense.
In my years editing the copy of reporters, most of the problems I saw fell into three large categories: holes in the story, bad organization of facts, bad transitions from one issue to another. A Washington Post story today is a perfect example of the second problem.
In a story about the latest Andrew Breitbart ACORN video, the Post reporter wrote this in the first two paragraphs of the story (emphasis is mine):
Two undercover videographers released another videotape Wednesday of their interaction with an ACORN worker, contending that it reveals help they received from the community group’s Philadelphia office when they posed as a pimp and a prostitute seeking a home.
Unlike previous videotapes, the heavily edited footage includes audio of the two conservatives but none of the ACORN Housing Corp. worker’s responses to their questions.
What is the average reader, who reads about three paragraphs of a story before moving on the next, to think of this? Well, the tape is “heavily edited” so the undercover right-wingers must be up to no good. And what’s with them refusing to include the ACORN official’s responses? Surely, that means the responses would have shown ACORN in a good light.
Only if one were to read to the end of the story, to the 13th paragraph, would the reader learn this (emphasis added):
O’Keefe and Giles declined to take questions after playing the video at the National Press Club Wednesday. O’Keefe said that he had edited out Conway-Russell’s responses because of a lawsuit filed by ACORN over the first videos.
Breitbart said: “We ask that ACORN and the lady consent to play the audio, to dispel the discrepancy.”
Copy editors are supposed to anticipate reader questions as they edit. If I were editing this story, that second paragraph would have alerted me to reader questions about why the ACORN responses were not included. That answer is in the 13th paragraph when it should have been in the second. It would have improved this story if the second paragraph had read this way:
Unlike previous videotapes, the heavily edited footage includes audio of the two conservatives but none of the ACORN Housing Corp. worker’s responses to their questions because of a lawsuit filed by ACORN over the first videos.
I’ll even grant the “heavily edited” since it is explained immediately by the lawsuit information. How simple would that have been to change? Not very. Perhaps my joke in the first paragraph of this column is not too off the mark.
Jon Ham is vice president of the John Locke Foundation and editor of its newspaper, Carolina Journal.