Today's Blind Ignorance Award Goes to (drum roll)...

From time to time this blog will bestow its highest lowest honor, the Blind Ignorance Award. This is not an award given lightly. One has to be truly out of touch to receive this award.

Today's award goes to the mercifully unnamed headline writer at the Marin Independent Journal. He (or she) took a story about women journalists finally getting their recognition as serious journalists and not objects of desire and titled it "Sexy Socialization." Really, I'm not making this up. The headline is in at least 72-point type as it looms beneath images of Lisa Ling, Rachel Maddow, Nancy Pelosi (journalist?) and Jane Fonda (another journalist?). By the way, how could anyone write a story about female journalists and not include Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes. Jane Fonda, journalist, really?

The article, which is about the film "Miss Representation" about female journalists (get it, pun lovers?), actually has the phrase "...in which she excoriates the media for its demeaning portrayals of women as sexual objects, consequently damaging the self-esteem of young girls and blunting their aspirations for leadership roles in American society." This would be a powerful statement if it wasn't under the umbrella of a huge banner reading "SEXY SOCIALIZATION."

One of my first jobs, after spending five years in home construction, was as a reporter at my hometown paper, The Turlock Daily Journal.  I started as an intern while I was in college and returned after graduation as a reporter. To give you a sense of that paper's focus, I can refer you to one of today's headlines on their website, "Farmers Seek Longer Irrigation Season." It was there I was first exposed to the headline writer. This is a person more obsessed with finding something catchy that fits in the space available on the page than actually linking the headline to the content of the story.

I once wrote a story for the lifestyle section that was a profile of a "chiropractor" who only worked on dairy cows. (Still not making this up.) The dairy would call the chiropractor and he would go out there and literally whack the cow with a rubber mallet and a stick and the dairymen would swear that the afflicted cow would then produce more milk. I wrote the story a bit tongue in cheek. I didn't trash the "doctor," but I wrote more about the image of a guy on a step-stool whacking a cow with a rubber mallet than an actual miracle cure for cows.

Sure enough, the headline writer puts something up like "Chiropractor Cures Cattle" over the story and the next thing I know my story is picked up by the Associated Press and printed across the state...well, at least across the Central Valley. My guess is the Los Angeles Times probably skipped the big "cow chiropractor story" that week. The next thing I know I'm getting calls from television news stations wanting to know how to get in touch with this cow miracle worker. The guy ended up being famous and, most likely, pretty well off due to a headline writer not actually reading the story for which she was writing the headline.

Working at a small town, rural paper in the late '80s was interesting. I was fresh out of college and thought that I was going to find and write about my own Watergate someday. I actually ended up writing more about life in the country. I had a brief stint on the "crime beat" and after viewing a car accident with children badly injured as the first-responders arrived, I realized I didn't have the stomach for that. So, I found my niche writing about people and I guess I still enjoy that even though it's not my day job.

The paper had a real live press in the back. It was immense and it really was a rush when it would kick into gear at about 2 p.m. (we were an evening paper) and vibrate the entire building. The entire crew managing the press were drunk. There was a bar behind the Turlock Journal and most of the press crew would be in the bar until someone went over to let them know that the paper was ready to be printed. It's a wonder I never saw someone seriously injured back there. Even drunk, these guys had been doing this so long that they managed to keep their limbs out of the whirring gears and belts that made up the press.

So, dear Marin IJ headline writer, I look forward to tomorrow's story about a five-car pile up on Highway 101 with the headline "Reduced Speed Results in Reduced Emissions on Green Highway."