| TOXIC TALK How the Radical Right Has Poisoned America's Airwaves Bill Press New York: Thomas Dunne Books, May 2010 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-312-60629-9 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-312-60629-X | 310pp. | HC | $26.99 | |
| Page 22: | "On other fronts, feminism has won women the right to vote and pay equity in the workplace..." |
| Clumsy phrasing: S/B "salary equity" or the standard "equal pay for equal work" to make it clear that "pay" is not a verb in this context. |
| Page 50: | "So there is no doubt who is the Republicans' top dog, and no one had dare suggest otherwise." |
| Missing word: S/B "had better dare" (just "dare" works, but sounds a bit archaic.) |
| Page 78: | "As we'll soon see, Hannity lied like a rug about Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign." |
| Wrong tense: S/B "lied constantly" (or equivalent.) The original fails because the past tense of "lies" (what Press want here) is "lay", which breaks the idiom. "English is cr-a-a-zy!" |
| Page 81: | "On Harold Koh." |
| Not a sentence: S/B "On Harold Koh:". (On Harold Koh! On King! On you great huskies!) |
| Page 92: | "...he repeatedly accused Obama of promising to cut 'tens of millions of dollars'..." |
| Magnitude: S/B "billions" (as earlier in the same paragraph.) |
| Page 96: | "When the sputtering Bush economy finally collapsed in the fall of 2008, everybody on the Republican side of the aisle went looking for one." |
| Missing context: it's not clear what the "one" is they were looking for. A scapegoat, presumably. |
| Page 108: | "...few were nuttier than Alabama's so-called Ten Amendments judge Roy Moore, who lost his job as chief justice for refusing to remove a 2.6-ton monument of the Ten Commandments..." |
| Wrong word: S/B "Ten Commandments judge". |
| Page 120: | "Once he was in the White House, Savage's attacks on Obama didn't end." |
| Dangling participle: exchange "he" and "Obama," then change "he" to "him". |
| Page 131: | Savage: "There's always the thrill and possibility they'll be raped in a Dumpster while giving out a turkey sandwich.." |
| Not just vile and scurrilous, but logically absurd: why would they be giving out sandwiches in a dumpster (or Dumpster)? |
| Pages 142-3: | "David Viscott's TV program LoveLine had "a brief, four-year run on MTV" but Rush Limbaugh's TV show "dragged on for four years." |
| Inconsistent. (OTOH, if I had to watch the two shows for equal periods of time, I know which one I'd find to drag.) |
| Page 145: | "But nobody outside of that godforsaken town—apologies to all Fargoans!—had ever heard of him." |
| Better to remove the word than apologize for it, nicht wahr? (And shouldn't it be "Godforsaken"?) |
| Page 154: | O'Reilly: "...and you'd definitely get two glasses of wine into you as quickly as I could get into you I would get 'em into you... maybe intravenously get those glasses of wine into you..." |
| O'Reilly is one messed-up dude... |
| Page 164: | "Dobbs was the only CNN anchor allowed to give his opinions, no matter how ugly or demented they are." |
| Mixed tenses: S/B "they were". |
| Page 172: | "I told you it was crazy, but it was a recurring theme of Lou Dobbs Tonight that the Mexican government considers large portions of the Southwest, known as the 'Aztlán', to still be Mexican territory." |
| Extra word: S/B "Aztlán". |
| Page 191: | "...she enjoyed immediate, sporadic, but never long-lasting success." |
| Contradictory/redundant: anything that's sporadic is not long-lasting. |
| Page 228: | "He [Gunny Bob Newman] accused Obama of planning to achieve his goals through the creation of 'a civilian military force'." |
| Absurd: no doubt a result of "subliminal consciousness." |
| Page 246: | "Time and time again, they have shown that, in their zeal to push conservative talk and bury progressive talk—they are even willing to lose money doing so!" |
| Mismatched punctuation: S/B either two commas or two M-dashes. |
| Page 282: | "As Americans, political debate is not only protected by the Constitution, it is part of our nature." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "As Americans, we enjoy the right to political debate that". |
| Page 285: | "Their philosophy was 'EGBOK'—'Everything's going to be OK'." |
| Press cleaned up the grammar too much: S/B "Everything's Gonna Be OK". |
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