{"id":186096,"date":"2014-05-13T20:11:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-14T01:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/05\/13\/the-washington-post-has-done-the-impossible\/"},"modified":"2014-05-13T20:11:00","modified_gmt":"2014-05-14T01:11:00","slug":"the-washington-post-has-done-the-impossible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/05\/13\/the-washington-post-has-done-the-impossible\/","title":{"rendered":"The Washington Post has Done the Impossible"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In rewriting an OP\/Ed contributed by Ramesh Ponnuru, some as yet unamed editor has actually <a href=\"http:\/\/talkingpointsmemo.com\/livewire\/ramesh-ponnuru-washington-post-error\">lowered the quality of the <strike>indicted<\/strike> right wing pundit&#8217;s writing<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking to the universal desire of the right wing to excise the memory of Abraham Lincoln from our recent memory, he wrote in the <i>Post<\/i> that we should go back to calling it Washington&#8217;s Birthday.&nbsp; (I am old enough to remember when both Washington&#8217;s and Lincoln&#8217;s birthdays were both holidays, and not spot welded together), and some nameless editor at the paper changed his words in a fairly significant way:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cGetting rid of President\u2019s Day would not be difficult. All we would have to do is start calling the third Monday of February by its proper name under federal law: Washington\u2019s Birthday. That\u2019s the practice state governments and advertisers ought to follow.\u201d The version the Post ended up running struck the third sentence and replaced the second with \u201dAll we would have to do is designate the third Monday of February to mark George Washington\u2019s Birthday.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As an aside, I had a fair number of discussions about the writing business with science fiction author and editor Ben Bova, and noted that when he was editor-in-chief at <i>Omni<\/i>,<sup>*<\/sup> he had to fire a number of editors who refused to stop rewriting stuff.  (He makes a distinction with minor copy edits, and the editor <b>asking<\/b> for changes from the authors)<\/p>\n<p>Whoever made this change should be fired.&nbsp; Period.&nbsp; Full Stop.<\/p>\n<p><sup>*<\/sup><span style=\"font-size: xx-small;\">I am not sure if this was an issue during his stint at <i>Analog Science Fiction<\/i>, but I got the impression that it was less of an issue, probably because the editors were less likely to be frustrated writer English majors.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In rewriting an OP\/Ed contributed by Ramesh Ponnuru, some as yet unamed editor has actually lowered the quality of the indicted right wing pundit&#8217;s writing. Speaking to the universal desire of the right wing to excise the memory of Abraham Lincoln from our recent memory, he wrote in the Post that we should go back &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[974,978,982,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hack-journalism","category-politics","category-stupid","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186096"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186096\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}