By Elaine Viets
By Elaine Viets
Recently, I’ve seen a rash of news stories with headlines like these:
“Retired Air Force four-star general opens up about Wright-Patt, DDC.”
“Marine general opens up about battle with prostate cancer.”
“Wells Fargo CEO opens up about his childhood in poverty.”
Opens up? No, they didn’t.
“Opens up” implies that a person hesitates to talk about a subject, then relaxes and spills the information they didn’t intend to. “Opens up” paints a cozy word picture: We see the reluctant subject settling in over a beer or a cup of coffee, looking a bit nervous. After skillful questioning, the interviewer pries that pearl of information out of the oyster. The subject opens up and reveals a deep secret.
Wrong.
Retired generals and CEOs don’t open up. They didn’t get to the top by opening up anything, especially their mouths. Every word they say in public is carefully calculated.
Even clown prince Donald Trump knows what he’s doing when he shoots off his mouth. His outrageous remarks get him the attention he needs to rack up the poll numbers – he wants to be one of the top ten in the Republican presidential debate.
And while we’re talking about opening up, why doesn’t Trump’s barber open up and say the Donald’s hair looks lousy?
Anyway, about that so-called opening up: The retired four-star general didn’t open up about the air force base.
He told a newspaper he didn’t like “the focus on a potential Base Realignment and Closure process — because he sees bigger dangers to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — and warns of complacency because the base has fared well in recent years.”
That isn’t “opening up.” The general is sounding off, possibly to preserve a local pork barrel. He’s been put up to “open up,” and the headline writers fell for it.
And the Marine General who “opened up” about his prostate cancer?
More careful calculation. The story says, “In the midst of planning a complicated drawdown in forces, the Marine Corps’ three-star manpower chief received startling news: He had cancer.”
But he soldiered on, did his military duty and survived his battle with cancer.
That was one brave general. But the article stresses that many men, important men, get prostate cancer, get treated and survive.
I salute the general for discussing a sensitive issue. But he didn’t “open up” – as an ex-reporter I smell a carefully calculated public relations opportunity. He discussed prostate cancer and urged other men to get the exam they fear.
Then there’s that Wells Fargo CEO. Did he really “open up” about his poverty-stricken childhood? Absolutely. Right after he handed out free money to the first one thousand customers.
Hell, no. That “opening up” was another PR ploy. Wells Fargo has had a wagon load of bad publicity about its foreclosures. But here’s this CEO, “one of 11 children growing up on a farm in small-town Minnesota,” who “knows how much trouble we were in financially by the time I was 6 years old . . . We bounced between bankruptcy and foreclosure until I was 15 or 16, when we got a chicken farm, where we had 15,000 laying hens. All of a sudden we had regular income.”
Oh, and by the way, Well Fargo “will continue serving real customers in the real economy.”
Sniff! Sniff! What’s that smell? Is it coming from that team of Wells Fargo horses?
Watch where you step, writers. And be careful about “opening up.”
You can fall into a dangerous word trap.
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Great article and a great reminder of the many traps you have to look out for when writing. (I once submitted a short story where a character was described as “the prettiest little angle you ever saw.” It should have been angel.)
English is a funny old language full of linguistic pitfalls and that’s before you get into the differences between English, American English, Australian English etc. But I still prefer it to having to remember whether a French or German word is masculine or feminine. Never could get those right.
Finally a quick question: What does “possibly to preserve a local pork barrel” mean please? I’m not familiar with the expression. Thanks.
All the Best,
Matthew.
Hi, Matthew. Pork is a fatty meat and invidual members of Congress fight to deliver barrels of pork to their constituents at home A local pork barrel means a political perk that provides jobs and business to an area. Military bases are prime examples of pork — the region feeds off the service people and government jobs. Often, a military base needs to be de-commissioned, but the area’s representatives will fight to keep it on — and keep those local votes.
Thanks. That makes a bit more sense now.
I don’t know, I kind of like Trump, lol!
Jeez, Phil, you seem so sane. Of course, your hair is covered by that ball cap. You aren’t hiding a combover, are you?
As a former reporter, I have a long list of objections with the way some journalists (and their headline writers, who are usually editors), do their jobs. The sin you’ve pointed out, Elaine–getting manipulated by a thinly veiled PR ploy–is high on that list.
It takes another reporter to recognize “a thinly veiled PR ploy,” Kathryn. And you’re right — editors usually write the headlines. I’ve had more than one story ruined by a dumb headline.
Elaine, isn’t “dumb headline” an oxymoron? Anyway, thanks for the article–glad you opened up about the problem. : )
Only when the oxymorons write a dumb headline, Richard. And as a former reporter, I can tell you that ALL dumb headlines are the fault of editors.
Well, we know press folks are lemmings. They latch onto a phrase they love and gnaw it to death. (Wait…that might be a mixed metaphor. Not sure lemmings “gnaw.”)
Remember when everyone was walking it back or throwing people under the bus? And now we seem to need a “national conversation” about everything. I’ll pass on that, thanks. I’d now add “opening up” to the list.
Hmm, don’t lemmings run over cliffs into the sea, PJ? No, wait, National Geographic debunked that myth. How about “the hounds of the press latch onto a phrase and gnaw it to death.”
Glad I opened up about that.
No, I think that’s Disney Execs…
From one of many web pages on the subject:
“The myth of mass lemming suicide began when the Walt Disney movie, Wild Wilderness was released in 1958. It was filmed in Alberta, Canada, far from the sea and not a native home to lemmings. So the filmmakers imported lemmings, by buying them from Inuit children. The migration sequence was filmed by placing the lemmings on a spinning turntable that was covered with snow, and then shooting it from many different angles. The cliff-death-plunge sequence was done by herding the lemmings over a small cliff into a river. It’s easy to understand why the filmmakers did this – wild animals are notoriously uncooperative, and a migration-of-doom followed by a cliff-of-death sequence is far more dramatic to show than the lemmings’ self-implemented population-density management plan.”
I can only assume that ‘placing the lemmings on a spinning turntable that was covered with snow, and then shooting it from many different angles’ means to film them from multiple directions. And not as I originally read it, which was spinning the turntable so fast it launched the lemmings everywhere….
Disney! I should have known the Mouse was behind stage mass suicide. Thanks for clearing this up, Matthew.
I love this blog audience.
Happy to help.
Huh. Didn’t know suicide lemmings was a myth. As for headlines, I would never have survived as a headline writer. I would have written things such as, “City Gets a New Cat House” on a story about a new cat shelter.
But most of my stories have survived dumb headlines. What really torqued me off was when the “know-it-all” editor edited an error into my copy.
Anne, my newspaper friends didn’t believe me when I told them that New York editors actually ask permission to change your novel. The difference between a newspaper editor and a publishing editor is the difference between a butcher and a surgeon.
Reminds me of a true story. A guy hand calculated how many transactions his dept did each day. His picky boss expected it regularly, even hand written. As a gag he called it the OSC for old Spanish custom, a personal joke when people asked him why he did it.
Years later after he had quit the company, he returned to find they had mechanized his report but still called it the OSC. When he asked employees about the title header, no one knew what it meant. With a great sense of irony, he smiled and left, not explaining it.
LOL. Back when newspaper stories had slugs (those are used before they get headlnes), stories about Native Americans (known as Indians then) were slugged “Lo,” as in the line from the poem, “Lo, the poor Indian.”
C’mon Elaine, I sense you’re holding back a little in this article. Don’t just hint, you really need to open up. Keeping it bottled up isn’t good for your mental health.
Still, what can you expect regarding headlines. They say (whoever “they” are) that readers of newspapers have an average reading age of twelve. Anything more intelligent than those headlines would be beyond them. Great article, by the way 😀
Let me open up about newspaper editors — the average reader is not nearly as stupid as the average editor.
Pretty much 🙂