Let’s Eat Grandma ∞

Friday, July 25th, 2014

On Wednesday, The AP’s Twitter account posted the following:

AP Tweet: BREAKING: Dutch military plane carrying bodies from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash lands in Eindhoven.

There was no plane crash on Wednesday, and if you work especially hard, you can work out their intended meaning. However, it’s clear that the initial interpretation of most people was that a second plane had crashed. This is some truly terrible writing. The AP tweeted a clarification, and posted on their blog about this, but they’ve also chosen to let the original tweet stand.

What really puts the tweet over the top is their unnecessary use of “BREAKING”. A plane crashing would indeed be breaking news. A plane successfully landing, even one carrying the bodies of the victims of a plane crash, is not breaking news at all.

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