Originally Posted by IO540
And local newspaper "journalists" are usually about as far from being the sharpest knives in the drawer as one can get, but they have the job of dressing up the irrelevant local-news dross they are given into something to fill the pages.
To be fair, there are some competent local press journos, and it goes like this ...
(1) Journo writes decent report of what actually happened.
(2) Sub thinks it's too boring, finds a tiny quote somewhere in the report to deliberately misinterpret and turn into a shock-horror headline.
(3) Punters complain to the journo, who in actual fact turns out to be just as pissed off about how her piece was mangled as the punters are.
(Yes yes, real example from a real local paper this week.)