Man held over letter bombings is a cyclist
When I read this headline in today’s Times I began to wonder whether I had picked up The Sun by mistake. Then I got cross at such a ludicrous piece of journalism. But maybe I’ve been done a favour. Riding a bike in London can be hair-raising at times. If motorists suspect that I could be a bomber they might give me a bit more road.
The headline also made me think of ‘ Man bites dog’ journalism. * Wikipedia has an interesting entry on this subject which made me think that the reason for this headline was that the scribbler thought that bombings in the UK had become such a frequent event that he or she needed to add something unusual to the story to make it newsworthy. As Private Eye says, “Shurely some mistake.”
Happily the squirrel decided to have a go at the sunflower head I rescued from him in the summer and having put it aside for winter feed for the birds, hung up on the wire last week. The birds ignored it so I didn’t mind him having a go today. As he tightrope walked along the wire he provided the entertainment and interest lacking in The Times. Should I have headed this blog, “Non-cyling squirrel eats sunflower?” Or, “Squirrel influences rural depopulation in mid-Wales?”
* “The phrase Man bites dog and the related phrase Dog bites man are used to describe a phenomenon in journalism, in which an unusual, infrequent event is more likely to be reported as news than an ordinary, everyday occurrence. This can be explained by the fact that the news media generally considers an event more newsworthy if there is something unusual about it. On the other hand, a situation which is completely normal is unlikely to be taken as newsworthy. The result is that it may seem that news items which carry titles such as “Man Bites Dog” occur more often that those which carry ones such as “Dog Bites Man”. The remarkable thing is that the observation can be made even though examples of the latter occur far more frequently than the former.
The phrase comes from a quote attributed to New York Sun editor John B. Bogart: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”[1]“