Cripes! Trigger warning, or false advertising?
Reporting on the murder trial of a South Carolinian lawyer, Holly Honderich prefaces her filing with this warning:
For generations, the Murdaugh family dominated their rural swath of South Carolina - then Alex Murdaugh was accused of the brutal murders of his wife and son. What followed was the stunning unravelling of a life of power and privilege, exposing embezzlement, drug abuse and a failed hitman suicide plot. You may find some language offensive.
Holly Honderich, Walterboro, BBC News
Reading that, I eagerly anticipated the offensive language to come. But I read the article throughout. Twice. Other than a single instance of bullshit
, nothing! Not even anything that could only be interpreted as offensive by someone who uses cripes!
unironically.*
Okay, so the story deals with murder, manslaughter, murder-for-hire, corruption, and dynastic power in Hicksville. But if that were the basis for a warning, then many more BBC articles would require one.
My last resort was the Wayback Machine. Perhaps an earlier version of Honderich's report was spicier, and had to be toned down for the sake of the children. But the URL hadn't been captured as of this time of writing. Bah!
It's possible that it's been captured by a crawler that's yet to file its findings at the Internet Archive, but for now we're none the wiser. Anyhow, back to old-fashioned reportage in the backwaters of South Carolina.
"We all knew them," said one waitress in town, who also didn't want to give her name, saying she didn't want to "get in trouble" for speaking out of turn. She also didn't want to be recorded. "You're just going to have to remember this," she said. "They had power. And they took it too far."
Holly Honderich, Walterboro, BBC News
Between recording and having to rely on memory there's good old-fashioned note-taking. In the olden days—before copy/paste—journalists carried a pad and pencil. Presumably they don't teach that in journalism school these days; I guess that's left to on-the-job training. But it could've been useful as a backup here, Holly.
* A callout to Andy Rooney: My wife's from the Midwest. Very nice people there. Very wholesome. They use words like Cripes
. For Cripes' sake.
Who would that be—Jesus Cripes? The son of Gosh
, of the church of Holy Moly
? I'm not making fun of it. You think I wanna burn in Heck
?
Alex Murdaugh was found guilty on two counts of murder, and sentenced to life as an inmates' sexual plaything. Hardly noteworthy, except for this assessment of Judge Clifton Newman's demeanour, during what were at times excitable proceedings: The judge is supposed be the adult in the room, and he was very much the adult in the room.
The implication, that the attorneys and other participants are nothing but children, brought a smile to my haggard fizzog.
Murdaugh's trial for murder—in my head, the family name is pronounced similarly—has raked up the death of a teenager in 2015. The victim's mother was said, by her lawyer, to be seriously grieving for her son
.
Would that be as opposed to lightheartedly grieving for him? (confused)
All flippancy aside, I hope the authorities discover the truth, and Sandy Smith receives due justice.