Originally Posted by
vne165
It's missing the key journalistic phrase de jour, "reeling"...e.g. onlookers were left reeling after watching the horrific scene unfold.
Unless it's referring to something that might happen or is about to happen, then it's "onlookers are bracing......."
I put it in the same loose category as, for example, when QEII died and along with the wall-to-wall 24hr coverage repeating the same stuff ad infinitum, ad nauseam, we had repeated statements that "The world is in mourning" or "Australia is in mourning". No, it's not. Individuals might mourn and many likely didn't give a rats.
When I hear "The Palace has said" or "The Whitehouse has said" it always takes me back to my childhood and HR Puffin-stuff where the buildings and even the trees talked.
Add to standard phrases the media love; 'slammed', 'cohort', 'the xxxxxxx space' (strangely, when talking about NASA, they never say 'the space space'), 'It comes after.......' and my favourite where aviation is concerned "It's ageing fleet of......." Any aeroplane more than a few years old is ageing. Fact is, the moment an aircraft rolls off the assembly line, it is ageing.