Worst lede ever, right? No really, it is the worst lede ever.

Did anyone read this story?

While she was being operated on, by a team of doctors, this guy was sticking his pecker in her mouth?

 

Well, that's pretty much horrible.

 

A prep gamer in the Waukegan News-Sun once began (and I can't remember the teams involved): Podunk was New Orleans to West Podunk's Hurricane Katrina on Friday night ...

 

There was one at my first paper where the just-out-of-college news editor wrote about a fatal car accident involving a child.

I'm not getting it exactly right, because its been many years since it happened, but it was something along the lines of, "Jimmy found out the hard way why it's bad to play in street ..."

Tasteless enough on its own, but also potentially libelous as the story/police report made no mention of anything of the kind.

It was an afternoon paper and I saw it on a proof late the night before. Though I had no supervisory authority to do so, I called the assistant NE over and made him change it, making it plain that his boss and the paper could've been sued for it, whether I was overstating that probability or not.

 

I did not know this, but have since learned (and our Canadian SJ friends can probably confirm) that shit like this is Rosie DiManno's "thing." She is a terrible writer, and has been writing terribly for years, and frequently gets obsessed with penis allusions and shocking inappropriate "turns of phrase" -- if you can even call it that.

What's absurd is how many levels the lede fails on. It's not only offensive, it's nonsensical. How would this woman "gain" a penis in the way she "lost" a womb? Is the penis in her "slack" mouth in perpetuity? Also, be sure to catch it later in the story where DiManno describes the mom as "attractive."

Good job, Toronto Star, good effort.

 

OK, it was a clever fail.

 

Awful. Just awful.

 

Without knowing the subject, because I wanted to look at this sentence and didn't check the headline first, I first thought this was going to be about a person who underwent female-to-male sexual assignment surgery.

Then the second sentence made me go back to the first one and ask, "What the fuck?"

 

Would be nice to see this lede next:

"Rosie DiManno found out the hard way last week that it doesn't pay to be a dick in print. The Star has fired DiManno and her womb."

 

"Shameless," said Richard Marx.

 

I'm sure someone at some point wrote something for some college newpaper that blows this out of the water, but I doubt anyone with this kind of reach, writing for a seemingly repsectable news organization, has ever sunk this low.

 

I'm sure they have, but this is in the hall of fame. Almost as tasteless as the reason the story was written. Almost.