HERE’S A juxtaposition, for you–a pair of enjambed propositions fresh from Thursday’s Washington Post: “In November, researchers announced that they had made the first human embryo clones, giving immediacy to warnings by religious conservatives and others that science is no longer serving the nation’s moral will. At the same time, the United States was fighting a war to free a faraway nation from the grip of religious conservatives who were denounced for imposing their moral code on others.”
We have a name for this in journalism. We call it “editorializing,” and it’s a perfectly fair thing to do. Or rather, it would be a perfectly fair thing to do if its implication–that those who oppose cloning in the United States are equivalent to the Taliban in Afghanistan–were remotely plausible and if it had been printed on the newspaper’s editorial page.
