On the morning of Wednesday June 23, I made a quick check of headlines on my Yahoo home page before heading to work. On Tuesday, District Judge Martin Feldman’s decision to overturn the Obama administration’s moratorium on offshore drilling became the lead story on American news wires. The top headlines were interesting, to say the least.
The headlines blared about how the judge who overturned the ruling owned “holdings in at least eight petroleum companies or funds that invest in them, including Transocean Ltd., which owned the Deepwater Horizon.” Being an amateur blogger, I didn’t take a screen capture, and of course different headlines were showing by the time I got home from work that evening. While I have no issue whatsoever with journalists exposing how public officials are weighing in on issues where they have a conflict of interest, the fact that the headline had to be changed and scrubbed away from search engines tells the story of how poorly the original headline was written. Reread the key phrase:
“holdings in at least eight petroleum companies or funds that invest in them”
So, the judge owned some mutual funds and failed to vet every company where they invest? I’m not going to dignify this point with any further comment.
Here is a better question – why can’t the press apply such standards universally, especially when it comes to people or issues that they support? We should be seeing headlines like these:
“Divinity school dropout millionaire con artist pushes for higher taxes on the world’s poorest that will enrich his investments”
or
“Organization responsible for bankrupting US automakers granted ownership by most powerful recipient of their campaign contributions”
I’m not holding my breath, but one can hope…
Crossposted from Brothers Bob Blog
