by David Safier
This Star headline gaffe is minor compared to the others I've posted about, but a friend pointed it out to me — I missed it — and it deserves a quick mention.
The headline reads:
Incumbents slammed as 7 Dems debate in District 27 House race
Incumbents? Did the Democratic candidates slam all incumbents, including Democrats? I seriously doubt it. I wasn't there, but I know some of the candidates, and they would not speak badly of current Democratic legislators.
And since both LD27 incumbent reps are termed out, the candidates aren't running against "incumbents," only against each other, so they have no reason to stoke anti-incumbent fires.
Change one word and the headline makes more sense:
Incumbents Republicans slammed as 7 Dems
debate in District 27 House race
The headline isn't the work of Rhonda Bodfield, who wrote the story. But the head was probably pulled from this line in her story, which could have been more specific:
Disgust with current lawmakers was common.
In context, it's pretty clear the "current lawmakers" they're slamming are Republicans, but in the headline, it looks like this is another "anti-incumbent year" story. It isn't.
Bad headline.
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As a fellow avid documenter of the Star’s frequent and sometimes seemingly deliberate errors, it upsets me that getting caught by bloggers doesn’t seem to bother them a whole lot. They tend not to admit when they get things wrong, they get things wrong a lot, and their wrongness is reliably bent in one political direction. This is the opposite, of course, of how a newspaper is supposed to serve its community.