There are many pressures in reporting a breaking news story—getting the facts and getting them out before the next guy perhaps paramount among them. But The Scrapbook thinks that those pressures notwithstanding, a fine publication such as the New York Times could find time to avoid the hoariest of clichés, especially when the cliché in question misreports the facts.
The cliché we’re talking about appeared in the Times‘s main story about the gunman who attacked baseball-playing Republicans last week, “Steve Scalise Among 5 Shot at Baseball Field; Suspect Is Dead.” Here’s how the paper describes the wounding of the House majority whip: “Standing at second base, Mr. Scalise was struck in the hip, according to witnesses, and collapsed as the shots rang out.” Shots rang out. It is one of those trite, lazy expressions that one expects (and gets) from local TV news reporters winging it at the scene. But one expects better of the Times, even when they are racing to get a story up online. What one doesn’t expect is for the Times to use the same pulpism twice in one article, but that’s just what the paper does: Later in its story the Times reports it was 7:09 a.m. “when the first shots rang out.”
It’s such a tired phrase that E. L. Callihan, in his mid-fifties Grammar for Journalists, banished it along with such shopworn journalese as “caught red-handed,” “shrouded in mystery,” “miraculous escape,” and “hail of bullets.” (That last one, by the way, also made it into the Times story.)
But as for gunfire ringing, the Times‘s own reporting put the lie to that description. A nearby resident, for example, “was finishing his coffee when he heard the ‘pop, pop.'” The Times quotes congressman Mike Bishop: “There was so much gunfire, you couldn’t get up and run,” the Michigan Republican said. “Pop, pop, pop, pop—it’s a sound I’ll never forget.”
Other papers collected accounts of the popping sound made by the gunman’s weapon. Here’s how Arizona senator Jeff Flake described the events: “We were doing batting practice near the end of the practice,” he said, “and all of a sudden, we heard just a very loud pop, and it sounded like gunfire.” A woman in the nearby dog park heard “very, very loud popping sounds.” Some heard bullets “whiz” by.
We suspect that the “shots rang out” cliché got its start back in the days when guns crackled with a noise that might plausibly have been described as “ringing.” But it’s silly to say shots ring when talking of the discrete report of a modern, military-style rifle.
Then again, for all its aural accuracy, “shots popped out” does sound a little lacking in gravity.
