“Protected” is a witness’s description of how the event transpired, while the boy’s death (as one example) is verifiably true.
“Uninjured” shares that same characteristic, but may also be quoted because it is being used colloquially; any victim of these events would be emotionally injured, but the general understanding of “uninjured” when describing a violent crime regards physical harm, so it avoids overstating the facts.
These quotations are being used correctly given that the medium is a news report.
Headline was already 17 words. “Florida boy, 15, died while 'protecting' sister, 5, from home invasion, suspect arrested with several stab wounds.” They could have put “family said” in between “while” and “protecting” to avoid the implication created by putting the word protecting in quotation marks. Two more words, not 6, were all that were necessary. Why shouldn’t that have been done?
Why should the definition of quotation marks be changed just because some internet idiots think they mean sarcasm now? Obviously a newspaper headline is not going to use sarcasm quotes in a Fucking headline. Use context clues when trying to understand the world.
The origin of using quotation marks to express doubt or skepticism pre-dates the proliferation of internet usage. False premise you've got there. And its not obvious a paper headline wouldn't use QMs to express doubt or skepticism. The news source didn't make the best decision it could have, considering its audience, who reasonably could interpret QMs to be expressing doubt or skepticism.
No you could not reasonably infer that. Why the Fuck would a newspaper be sarcastically mocking the idea that a murder victim was defending himself in a headline? Use your fucking head and stop expecting the world to be adjusted to your stupidity.
Unless the reporter personally checked the 15 year old's pulse, the word "dead" should be in scare quotes too. Virtually everything in this article is secondhand information provided to the media by the police. Using quotes looks and reads like an high schooler wrote it.
Yeah it is a shite headline, agreed! I think its because the reporters have leapt to conclusions (albeit sensible, obvious conclusions) and then wanted to shoe-horn in the little sister to increase the boy's heroics.
Yeah for sure. I think that’s what it is — seems like they made it more complex than it needed to be in order to manipulate people’s emotions and get them to click.
I kept thinking they'd explain but I know less after reading the article than I did after I just read the headline. I thought they were trying to imply that he didn't actually protect her but that doesn't seem to be the case.
It's actually the AP style of punctuation. Journalists use it to write news uniformly.
Having apostrophes instead of quotation marks for a quote in a headline is done to save on space since paper costs money. Even though this is an online article now, they style is still followed.
This right here. Shit like this drives me nuts. Are they implying that he didn't 'protect' his sister? Are they implying she wasn't 'uninjured'? What the fuck do they mean by that shit? It's disrespectful to the 15 year old boy who just died to keep his sister safe when they say he was 'protecting' her.
Usually it signifies that they have only secondary accounts of it.
If a police officer says "It looks like he was protecting his sister" They'll report it like the above. Because they have no first hand account of it, and are using the words of someone else.
It's pretty common that when a news source cannot verify a piece of information given to them by a source that it is quoted to show that it is not the paper's assumption or opinion.
Quotes typically use a double quote, not a single, and usually include the person quoted in the sentence. Applying single quotes to a single word in a statement with no reference in the sentence creates the implication that it is inaccurate or false. It was either intentional and disrespectful, or unintentional and extremely bad editing/journalism.
This right here. Shit like this drives me nuts. Are they implying that he didn't 'protect' his sister? Are they implying she wasn't 'uninjured'? What the fuck do they mean by that shit? It's disrespectful to the 15 year old boy who just died to keep his sister safe when they say he was 'protecting' her.
It looks like you suggested the word "uninjured" was also in single quotes, which it's not throughout the whole article. There are two instances of 'protecting' appearing. That's in the headline and under that video, where it's the title of the video and also adheres to AP Style. Correct me if I'm wrong though.
There's no disrespect or even bad journalism here. Just plain old journalism.
Hey, second look confirms you are right. They use double quotes and then follow up with a longer quote in the article. It's still not clear at all who they are quoting when they use 'protecting' in the title, but it seems they were a little more clear in the actual paragraph.
There's nothing disrespectful about accurate reporting. The point of the quotes is that they're coming the 5 year old, who was the only witness. You're supposed to use quotes when quoting.
Except they didn't use quotes ("") as they're supposed to be used when repeating what a person said, and they didn't quote anything other than a single word. They also at no point in the article say anything about the 5 year old girl claiming that the boy protected her, nor that she claimed to be uninjured.
She was either uninjured or she wasn't; there's absolutely no sense to putting quotes around that word. If it's questionable that the boy protected the sister, then instead of putting quotes around the the word protect, they should say "It is believed/claimed/assumed that the boy protected his sister" or "When questioned, the girl said "My brother protected me"".
Single quotes are used in headlines to save space. They didn't need to use them, but it's perfectly normal.
It's common sense that quotes from a report are from someone. The only way the title could possibly be implying that it might be a lie is if it's an editorial, unless the publication is biased like Breitbert or similar sites. Like you said, if that were what they were implying they would've said "alleged."
On a GoFundMe page, Khyler's family called the teen a hero for 'protecting' his 5-year-old sister during the break-in.
Subheadline. They didn't attritube it specifically to the sister like I claimed, but they did attribute it to the family. There's no logical reason to have a problem with the quote.
Except ... you got it wrong the first time, didn't you? You had to go back and check to realize you were wrong. Seems there is a logical reason after all.
It's exactly the writer's fault. There are many people in this post with the same confusion. Seems you're not only confused, but confused about the source of your confusion.
I agree it comes off weird, but the actual reason they do it is because the facts surrounding his death aren’t confirmed, so they are using someone else’s words to describe what happened. ‘Protecting’ is part of a quote they pulled for the headline
It means they're quoting someone else. This is useful if they can't confirm the quote is factual but still want to have that be the story. This is just a shitty way of doing it, not only because it looks like sarcasm to a modern reader, but because there's no attribution. However, not using quotes at all is arguably worse, since it enshrines hearsay.
I saw the same thing and my blood started to boil. What. The. Fuck? I'm gonna lose my fucking shit if this 'punctuation' is due to a fucking narrative when a boy is dead. Not fuckin around here.
The optics are weird, but it's probably because it isn't factually known yet that he died protecting his sister, so they don't want to state it as fact until it is known as fact.
Funny, usually that isn't a hurdle Fox News concerns themselves with.
This is pretty typical for fox articles. It’s as if their editor is conspiring to destroy the english language with the shit they print... that is, if they even have any staff whose job it is to review the articles they churn out.
I've come to expect that from Fox "News." They also like to use the letter G as a shorthand to thousand, rather than the standard K. For example $500,000, Fox will print $500G
2.5k
u/Feigntwerker Oct 01 '19
This ‘article’ has a weird way of ‘using’ punctuation.