Dear Huffington Post,
I love you. I worked on Arianna’s gubernatorial campaign where she autographed one of her books for me. As the big-names of journalism and television news are becoming ever more farcical, you properly captured the zeitgeist of the Obaman age.
But I implore your copywriter to stop using the term “slam” as a verb. You use it for everything. To wit:
Note that this was today’s front page.
Sadly, this isn’t just the Huffington Post. Other news sources might be more likely to pull out the thesaurus before posting a headline, but they ALL beef up the actual events behind the headline. Or, more to the point, spend a lot of time printing headlines about what this guy said about that guy rather than headlines saying what’s actually happening. It’s not “Obama presents economic plan”, it’s “GOP heavy hitters slam Obama economic plan”. It’s never “Scientists put forth theory of evolution”, its “Creationists slam scientists’ ‘Theory’ of evolution”.
There is no journalism but yellow.