OT: A new low for the AP (not JK related)

[Firespirit]

This article is disgusting. What has happened to the AP? When did it become a complete right-wing shill organization?

This article has used words with very specific overtones and connotations in order to subtly influence the reader to a particular point of view. It's really a masterwork of it. No one can ever tell me that word choice isn't important or deliberate when big media are involved.


http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/12/18/vegas.homeless.ap/index.html

Here are the opening statements, which set the tone for the entire article. Emphases mine:

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AP) -- This is a boomtown, but it is also scattered with signs of bust -- namely, homeless people. And the city is taking a hard line against them.

Translation: "Las Vegas is a great place to live but has one blot on it, those dirty layabouts. But the city is doing something about that."

With mixed success in the courts and on the streets, Las Vegas has tried sweeping away their encampments, closing a park where they hang out, making it a crime to feed them, even passing a ban on sleeping within 500 feet of feces.

Using the word "success" rather than "results" is significant. "Success" has immediate and positive associations, whereas "results" is ambiguous. The point is to promote the idea that these rules, which effectively make it a crime to be out of luck, are a good thing.

Mayor Oscar Goodman has been leading the charge in his effort to clean up and revitalize the city's aging downtown, north of the world-famous Las Vegas Strip.

"Clean up and revitalize." Strong positive words.

Goodman, a former lawyer for the mob with a flair for the dramatic, said many of the homeless are ruining things for their neighbors by breaking the law while on drugs and alcohol, and "that's intolerable to me."

A former lawyer for the mob? As in the Mob, the Mafia?!? But let's not focus on that; he has a "flair for the dramatic," a turn of phrase that makes him sound cool and whimsical.

Is it just me, or is this article -- the opening paragraphs especially -- a nice piece of psychological manipulation?

And just in time for the holidays. I mean, this is definitely the type of thing that makes people feel warm and fuzzy. Not at all like something straight out of Dickens's A Christmas Carol.

Las Vegas wants to criminalize homelessness, and, to drive home the point, put the homeless in an abandoned prison. What has this country come to?

[babylonsister]

1. Not a hint of a caring bone in anyone's body in that article.

No attempt to get at the cause of the homelessness, or to help these people, just get rid of them.

[wisteria]

2. This article is disgusting. "Don't feed them", my God, they are human beings.

I am ashamed to think that some people have come to believe that indifference and a lack of compassion and callowness are acceptable practices.