Discussion for article #231836
Good. The one who did the initial insertion should be fired for incompetence and risking the health of the paper. People working in journalism should know better.
Not sure about the editor, since the piece isn’t clear whether there was intent or incompetence.
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More shoddy TPM reporting: the “prank” remark was proposed by a blogger not associated with the paper. So, why put it in your title, even though it fits TPM philosophical reporting bent? Yes, I answered my question. LOL
LOL…so wrong, and yet so funny…
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Frankly, whoever originally wrote that “minorities” sentence might have a future at the Onion. But you can’t write something like that in a newpaper article thats supposed to be serious. Still, I agree that its funny.
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WHy ELSe BE a COP?
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Both of the fired should directly apply to the RNC, Fox News, or to any Republican in Congress, as I’m sure they be snatched right and fit right in!
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I started out in newspapers and if you had any sense you never, ever put that kind of jokey stuff in the pipeline the copy flows through, assuming it’ll get taken out. One place I worked had a local-news section called “Bay to Bay” and once on a slow news day a copy editor dummied in a subheadline: “Not a damn thing in Bay to Bay today” and she got distracted, nobody else caught it, and it ran that way. They made her publicly apologize and people wrote in to say it was the funniest, truest thing they’d seen in the paper for a long time.
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A starter outfit for your S&M fetish, and donuts.
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Copy editors don’t need to be humorless. They just need to be humorless about editing copy. Copy editors, like fact checkers, are employed to battle the demon Murphy and they dance with him at their peril.
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“Mistake” ??
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Sorry that a terribly foolish moment of what must have seemed like edgy humor (and something that reflected what let’s face it, a lot of people think and something that certainly wasn’t supposed to leave the copy room), ended up costing two people their jobs in an industry where jobs are really hard to come by.
Oops!
I meant to say that…
/S
You don’t have to love donuts to be a cop.
A fabulous lesson on this very subject:
(Sadly unavailable for free anywhere online,apparently…)
And you certainly don’t have to be a cop to love donuts. Mmmmm, dooo-nuts.
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A Kentucky newspaper fired two staffers on Thursday for adding a sentence into Thursday’s edition that said local police officers get into the profession “because they have a desire to shoot minorities.”
That’s clearly false; a lot of people go into the profession because they have a desire to shoot people.
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That was real dumb for sure. There seem to be 3 major reasons people become cops.
- They like Law Enforcement and actually take pleasure in doing the right thing. And there are plenty of those, they are the overwhelming majority.
- They like the early retirement and benefits, or the potential to fake an injury to get comp for life (and that happens a lot). But many of those types opt for prison guard or fire dept instead, easier duty, except when you have to go into a burning building, but fire dept has a lot of “down time” whereas cops always need to be patrolling.
- They like the power that comes with the job. They are easy to spot, the macho man attitude.
But in general cops like fighting crime and locking up dirtbags, and it’s not a fun job.
But no one wants to just shoot people.
You should check data from the real world instead of just pontificating from the top of your head:
Separated at Birth: The Personalities of Armed Police and Criminals
Interim findings from a research study
Richard WisenheimerCrime Research & Advisory Centre (CRAC)
The present study
An analysis of the day to day activities of armed police officers and certain criminals wouldsuggest that there are considerable overlaps between the two groups. Stress, long hours,tension, life threatening situations, the use of coercion, the expectation of conflict, a code of silence, and the opportunity to work in large powerful gangs, solidify a deep seated similarity between two groups that are constantly thrown into contact with each other. Two sides of the same coin, united in an unbreakable bond.
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The personality traits and work attitudes of 108 criminals convicted of assault (GBH orABH) and 96 police officers authorised to carry weapons were compared using a range ofpersonality measures including theZuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire (ZKPQ), a 30 item Work Values Inventory, and a multiple-choice sentence completion task.
…
Personality traits
On the ZKPQ, both groups scored significantly higher than the general population and various occupational groups on the following scales:Impulsive Sensation Seeking,Aggression-Hostility Work Activity They scored significantly lower on:Neuroticism-Anxiety Sociability.No significant differences were observed on the Infrequency (or Lie) scale. These findingsclosely match USA studies involving the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI).
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This kinda thing really doesn’t help.