Journalism, Sydney Morning Herald style

I saw this headline this morning in my news feed this morning:

THOROUGHBRED HORSE STABBED TO DEATH

Wow, sounds dramatic! So someone viciously attacked a horse and stabbed it until it was dead…?

Owner discovers dead animal with wound to abdomen in paddock south of Sydney

Oh, ok, so someone stabbed a horse once– still not very nice, but not quite the crazed horse-murdering psychopath I was picturing…

Then later the headline changed:

THOROUGHBRED HORSE STABBED TO DEATH – Plea for help after mare found stabbed in the stomach in paddock south of Sydney

Also included in the revised article is the horse’s name. The lady horse was called Casey and some brutal bastard stabbed her (probably after trying to have sex with her!)

Still later:

RETIRED RACE HORSE STABBED TO DEATH

Well I guess Casey wasn’t such a huge loss after all; past her prime if not ready for the knackers, but still, she was murderered…

Then finally:

HORSE STABBING MYSTERY SOLVED – A horse police believed to have been stabbed actually fell on a piece of concrete, a post mortem has found

A horse injured itself on something sharp and died, and somehow this was misconstrued as having been “stabbed to death” and the improbable sounding story was of course eaten up by so-called journalists.

Now finally we can close the case on The Mystery of the Brutal Stabbing of Casey the Retired Thoroughbred Racehorse.

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link to last version of the story, which will probably be invalidated within hours when the headline changes to “NATION MOURNS CASEY’S PASSING, BLAMES NO ONE”

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