March 06, 2007
The Air Bodies
Let's reorder a couple of key paragraphs from this New York Times article to make it more chronologically consistant, and see if you can tell what's missing:
On Sunday night, American forces at a small base in Tape Ahmed Beg, in Kapisa Province, northeast of the capital, Kabul, came under rocket fire at 9 p.m., the United States military said in a statement. When two men with Kalashnikov rifles were spotted entering a compound, the Americans called an airstrike, which ended the engagement, it said. [paragraph 5]Nine members of a family, including five women and three children, were killed in an American airstrike in central Afghanistan late Sunday during a battle with militants, Afghan officials said Monday. [paragraph 1]
What is obviously missing from this story is the status of the two men with AK-pattern rifles that were the trigger for the airstrike.
Did they somehow survive the strike? Were the killed along with the five women and three children? Why did they retreat to that particular compound? Were they possibly returning to their own homes? Did they vanish into thin air?
As far as these curiously incurious reporters are concerned, that answer appears to be just as good as any.
I've been getting a kick out of this stuff lately for some reason, not because it's new or anything, but because it's so in your face. For instance, this weekend when I saw the headline:
ATTACK ON US CONVOY LEAVES 16 KILLED
Talk about whoring for hits on a news story.
News stories these days are chaotic, unorganized, and poorly structured, much like everything I write. But unlike me, the writers of these news articles claim to be informed, professional writers, so we can only assume that their writing style is intentional, deliberate, and not without motive.
Posted by: paully at March 6, 2007 01:06 AM
