This is almost as minutiaesque as typos at CNN, but it's one of my pet peeves. I'm sure we've all suffered through the tendency of news outlets to use excruciatingly bad humor to frame stories. As a regular reader of the San Francisco Chronicle web site, I know this pain all too well; it's practically guaranteed that'll you'll find at least one atrocious pun or crippled, groan-inducing joke on their site every day, whether in the headlines, the stories, or both. Today's bumper crop includes "Big Drag, Arnold was Joking" (about the Governator's recent claim that marijuana isn't a drug--at least when he's smoking it), "Foreign Concepts in Investing" (about international investing), and "Hoping to Spook Revelers" (about efforts to keep people from coming to the now-canceled Castro Halloween celebration). Longer on quantity than quality, I'll grant you, but they illustrate the point.
Today I happened across an example from Forbes that was so bad that my brain actually tried to retract my eyeballs back through my skull as I read it. It was a story titled "Goodyear Races Ahead", which opened thusly:
Consumers are speeding toward Goodyear.
On Tuesday, Goodyear Tire & Rubber reported hot-rodded third-quarter earnings, despite a 6% decrease in American tire sales.
Have they no shame? Have they no decency? But the suffering didn't even end there. The story linked to yet another masterpiece of subtle wit from Forbes, "Goodyear Bounces Higher":
Maybe it won't be a great year, but 2007 is starting out as a good year for Goodyear Tire and Rubber, which is recovering more quickly than it thought it woudl [sic] from last year's labor strife.
Are you noticing a pattern here? A pattern of evil so immense, so dark, so encompassing, that merely to name it is to risk your sanity? You aren't? Are you sure? Because I am.
I have a suggestion for Forbes: don't try to rip off The Naked Gun--it just makes you look bad.
FRANK: It's the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girl dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day.
JANE: Goodyear?
FRANK: No, the worst.
To redeem this post somewhat, here's an excerpt from that investment article that explains (in part) how Goodyear can have improved earnings despite a reduction in American tire sales:
U.S. multinationals are benefiting not just from faster growth overseas, but also from the falling dollar, which can make American-made goods more competitive in foreign markets and produce currency gains when companies repatriate their foreign profits.
Take McDonald's, which gets almost two-thirds of its revenue from overseas. For the quarter that ended Sept. 30, it reported that sales at restaurants open at least 13 months grew 5.1 percent in the United States, 6.5 percent in Europe and 11.4 percent in Asia/Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. Currency gains added $41.4 million or 3 cents per share to the fast-food chain's bottom line.
So although we actual human beings may not like watching our money shrivel away against other currencies, it's not a problem for multinational corporations.
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