How does the Arizona Republic irritate us? Let us count the ways ...

The main thing is just dopiness, I guess the word is.

A few days ago the paper, in one of those irritatingly un-bylined stories it likes so much, listed a bunch of local news squibs that for some stupid reason or another made it into Ripley’s Believe It or Not. This was how one started:

“Man’s best friend” may not cut it for a Scottsdale dog named Buddy, a trained German shepherd who saved his owner’s life by dialing 911 when he began having a seizure, police said.

Leaving aside the atrocious prose, you read on to discover … the dog didn’t “dial 911” at all:

Buddy […] is trained to press a programmed button until a 911 operator is on the line.

The story is just a bit of schmaltz for I guess the paper’s less demanding readers, but there’s a larger issue here of basic accuracy—and the feeling of bait and switch smart people are left with when reading stuff like this. When folks talk about the demise of newspapers, let’s remember that the papers would be in a lot better position if they spent a little less time packaging (and in this case repackaging) silly stuff like this.

Here’s another example: A column in the paper on Sunday, by syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, about the Iraqi immigrant who ran down his daughter and another woman in his car because he thought she was becoming too westernized.

The headline on the op-ed page was “Father, daughter caught in clash of cultures in Ariz.”

Headlines are hard to write in terrestrial publications, particularly when, as here, you have to write something coherent about the story to fit into the space assigned.

Still, “clash of cultures” is a bad hed. Running over a 20-year-old with your car isn’t “cultural.” It’s homicidal. And secondly, the column itself was making exactly the opposite point; that the father ran down his daughter and then fled the country, and that words like "honor"—as in the term “honor killing”—weren’t appropriate.

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p.s. Looking up the URLs for these two stories, I was struck again at how useless AZCentral.com is. I couldn’t find either story in the paper’s online archive and had to go begging in Google News. And when I searched for the father’s last name to find the second one on AZ Central, here’s part of what came up:

Nice!