Headlines on holidays -- how to minimize the impact of news you'd rather not break

Hours after Condoleezza Rice finished testifying before the 9/11 Commission last Thursday, the news broke that the White House staff was "working to declassify" the Aug. 6, 2001 memo that she and her boss insist contained no warning of what was about to happen, the memo titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S." And wouldn't you know it, those devoted public servants kept on "working to declassify" the document from then until midday Saturday, when they finally achieved that hard-fought goal. While we saw no video, not even a still image of the team slogging away, we could easily picture them slaving away there, teams of them lifting weighty phrases, carefully replacing them with ellipses, clearing all the brush, day after day, with hardly a break for rest or even water, until they finally emerged -- dirty, sweaty, but proud of a job well done and ready to celebrate the holiday weekend, already in progress for the rest of us. Coincidentally, that moment of accomplishment occurred, and the memo was released, at the exact best time to release news you'd rather nobody noticed: right smack between 5 p.m. Friday and midnight Saturday, the slowest time in the news business and a time most people are paying attention to their own private lives. Regular readers of Second-Day Lede may recall a mention of that rule here the other day, but we didn't mention then that holiday weekends are even better for releasing stealth news, especially if it's a holiday for several religions, but most especially if it's a big holiday for the people most likely to vote for the guy you work for: conservative Christians, for example.

For the rest of us, however, the memo reveals far more than the administration might have wanted to disclose. It clearly illustrates something about the socioeconomic situation of everybody that received it: apparently none of them has ever had to put together Ikea furniture, a toy train set, or anything else that has instructions in something less than clear English. Because if they had, they might have been able to assemble the thing out of the parts that came in that package:

Bin Laden: 14 references
Attacks: 8 references, including one "U.S. attack"
Bomb: 3 references
Hijacking: 2 references (including the phrases: "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings" and "hijack a U.S. aircraft" )
Terrorist: 3 references
World Trade Center: 1 reference, in lede
New York: 2 references
Washington: 1 reference
"Bring the fighting to America": 1 reference

  ¶ 4:42 PM |