I read a story via the New York Times iPhone app this morning about Saverio Todaro’s failure to carry out building safety tests for the City of New York. The journalist described how there are so many potential victims that the local prosecutor’s office had to set up a new web page just for this incident!
Given how pervasive and easy to use blogging software and blog sites are these days, I feel like the author of the article could have used a better way to impress upon the readers that the potential number of victims is so high.
Alternatively, if the author was simply try to pass along an important link so that readers could determine whether or not they were victims, I think he could have done so in a more direct, and less underwhelming way.
To my eye, the journalist effectively said “the number of potential victims is SO high that the prosecutor’s office spent about 3 minutes adding a new story to its website.” Not a lot of power behind that impact!
Posted 27 Apr 2010
Comments
One Response to “Over or understatement”
Leave a Reply
Ah…, but where government is concerned nothing is usually that easy