I wonder what he would make of the comparative treatment, most notably the headlines used and the length, of these two stories in today's IHT.
One concerns a black congregation church being burnt on U.S election night. That is described as 'an act of horror'(as well as being, further to my earlier post on the Spanish Royal story, two weeks behind the news curve).
A time of hope, marred by an act of horror
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/america/17land.php
A six-year-old boy being killed and his body dismembered in the east African state of Burundi, the latest in a series of attacks in the region on albinos, whose bodies are prized by witchdoctors, is headlined:
Albino boy killed and body dismembered in Burundi
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/11/17/africa/OUKWD-UK-TANZANIA-BURUNDI-ALBINOS.php
Which is an act of 'horror' seems pretty self-evident from where I'm sitting, if we don't want semantic devaluation to run wild, and I'll leave you to calculate the respective word count and news hole play.
However, in fairness, Mr. Gettleman in Nairobi did write about this 'horrific' problem back in June of this year (Albinos in Tanzania face deadly threat
By Jeffrey Gettleman (The New York Times) SUNDAY, JUNE 8, 2008) but there is something about the headlines that jars.
Don't get me wrong: burning a black church in America on the night Obama was elected is very troubling, deeply worrying, upsetting, racist and all the rest. But it's the relatively frivolous use of the word 'horror' in one story and the neutral, unemotive headline ascribed to the latest in a long line of truly 'horrific' child murders for the other story, that I don't care for.
If a murder of that nature took place in Detroit, I think we'd have an adjective, let alone an abstract noun, in the headline.
Horror is the Congo, horror is life in Iraq, horror is lots of things.
Horror/terror are words you just don't want to chuck around.
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