Dan Hulton's blog

VIA provides complimentary WiFi in it’s stations and on it’s Corridor (Montreal-Toronto) trains.

Straight-up complimentary, no charges, no sign-ups or anything silly.

I’m in the station just now and the speed is grand – we’ll just have to see how it goes on the train itself.

I am feeling completely uncharitable this evening, so it is time to criticize something that has always upset me. Bullshit, dancing-around-the-issue news writing. Witness, for example, the following article:

Elderly driver dies after car hits house

A woman in her seventies died Wednesday after her car struck a house in the Blossom park neighbourhood.

There is too much of this past-tense, verbs-being-applied-to-impersonal-nouns bullshit in news writing. Nobody ever assigns blame any more. The car struck the house, oil was spilled, a woman died of knife wounds – like its the fault of the inanimate objects in all these cases.

Are news organizations so desperate to cover their asses and not offend anyone that they’ll remove the heart and soul from the interesting news they’re trying to report, and replace it with boring, flat, featureless pap that will neverless get the facts across in the least-suable style possible?

This lady didn’t die because a car hit a house. She died because she had a heart attack while at the wheel, lost control of her automobile, and crashed her car into someone’s home.