Friday, April 30, 2004

Great Minds: Unfortunately, we journalists are addicted to cliches and tend to overuse them. And, even more unfortunate, we tend to use the same ones over and over. Case in point, both The New York Times and The Washington Post used a version of the "If a tree falls in the forest" cliche for their coverage of Bush's secret testimony with the 9/11 commission.

Here's Alessandra Stanley's lead in The Times:

If an important meeting takes place in the Oval Office and there are no television cameras to record it, did the meeting matter?

And here's Howard Kurtz's lead in The Post:

If a sound is made behind classified closed doors, does anyone hear it?

But you won't see any of that here. I avoid cliches like the plague.