For those who think George Zimmerman deserved a tough sentence, try this one:
Obama wanted to explain to those Americans who have never been followed, suspected or singled out because of the color of their skins why those who have took the murder of an unarmed 17-year-old black high school student so personally and viscerally, The president was not criticizing the jury.
Thus pronounced the Cleveland Plain Dealer – no, not some lowly foot-of-the-page intern, but the entire “Plain Dealer Editorial Board,” all of them.
This was last Saturday, August 3. They “corrected” the “took” to “taken” the following afternoon:
Obama wanted to explain to those Americans who have never been followed, suspected or singled out because of the color of their skins why those who have taken the murder of an unarmed 17-year-old black high school student so personally and viscerally,
Which doesn’t exactly help matters. Five days later everything else is still there, except for whatever’s meant to follow the comma after “viscerally”, which still isn’t there. So too is the casual assertion, in defiance of the verdict, that what happened to Trayvon Martin was “murder.”
My point re the Boston Globe, Newsweek, and the Washington Post this last week has been a simple one — that, by comparison with almost anywhere else in the English-speaking world (from London to Lahore), American newspapers are unreadable. But not usually as dizzyingly so as this one. Ohio has a population of over 11 million — or greater than Denmark and Norway combined — and the editorial board of its biggest daily paper is lazy, ignorant, and illiterate. Who would miss it?