Exclusive: Wiltshire man murdered on social media server
One definition of the noun ambiguity in English is “a word or expression that can be understood in two or more possible ways“.
Nearly 5 decades ago, when your ‘umble scribe started his first job as a staff translator for Imperial Tobacco and was being schooled in how to write in the company’s internal house style, one definite rule that was imposed was that of avoiding any and all ambiguity.
This is a practice that does not seem to be prevalent in titles in the current Reach plc newspaper stable, including Bristol ‘Live’, the conglomerate’s newspaper of (warped) record for the greater Bristol area.
And so it came to pass that in the process of trawling social media for something that qualifies as investigative ‘journalism’, the Post looked further afield than the BS postcode and ventured into the the wilds of Wiltshire for a story.
Yes, that’s right! If one just read the headline, the impression is given that the murder victim was killed on a server in the employ of Mark Zuckerberg. However, in the actual body of the report, the copy does state that no killing occurred on Facebook itself.
The mum of a murdered teen found out about the killing on Facebook before receiving a phone call asking if it was true.
How the headline and the copy body can portray two different versions what transpired seems to have by-passed its two named authors and the SWNS news agency credited as being responsible for writing the piece is beyond belief. In the old days, this would have been picked up and remedied by a sub-editor (before Reach made them all redundant. Ed.). All 3 parties involved were obviously not paying attention either in school English classes or media studies lectures when some of the finer points of good writing were being imparted.