Shades of Neville Chamberlain

      American Journalism 101: Class, you are dealing with an assignment that will make your local readership look very, very bad indeed, so you need to tweak the details of the story to make matters seem more gentle, more everyday than they would otherwise seem. How do you do it? The answer: the tried-and-true form called "Burying The Lede," in which you save what otherwise seem the most crucial details until the end of the article where they will most surely be minimized (and largely unread). By placing these details at the end of your article, you can realign the context of the reporting so that you can find a more neutral, and less offensive, way of reporting on an ugly incident, and you can install a built-in apology for those ugly details before anyone finally gets to them. After all, you don't want to make your readership angry by calling them on their astonishingly uncivilized behaviour. This will cause a drop in sales and hailstorm of hate-mail, particularly if your community has been dispensing a fair bit of hatred lately. Although some say this allows diplomacy to win out over morality and veracity, it's a classic peace-making exercise in "half-reporting," or what some call "spin." Your task for today is to examine this classic example of "Burying The Lede" and consider the various ramifications of this particular way of "reporting the truth" and other ways in which the story might, in fact probably should be, told. Extra credit: determine what H.L. Mencken would have done with this situation, and/or Edwin Newman. See you next week, and, please, clean up your Doritos: the cleaning lady's becoming right cranky about the mess. Cheers.