Angry in the Great White North

cnews has realized that it's not all Gurmant Grewal's fault.

Their story (which I still suspect they poached from me, grrrr!) on Canada's drop in rankings on the list of corrupt nations first bore this headline:

Later it morphed into:

This is a remarkable time-travel affect, since the drop has been steady since 2000, as noted in the story.

Now the story has a new headline:

Scandals. Plural. The story still blame Grewal in the first paragraph, but mentions Adscam in the second. Of course, it does not list other scandals that have been in the news in the last five years, like Shawinagate.

It's good that they have addressed the problem in the headline, but I'm surprised at the quality of the editing at cnews. The St. Petersburg Times has these guidelines for the editors:

D. Strive for great headlines, not serviceable ones. Headlines are the first thing a reader sees. Yet, they can be the last dashed-off part of our jobs. Think about that again: They are the first thing a reader sees. Are you happy with that first impression?

The editor should have understood the scope of the story -- Canada's rankings over 5 years, not just 5 weeks -- and immediately realized that the problem has little (or nothing) to do with the Grewal tapes. That story was simply too recent to have had any effect on the numbers being tabulated by Transparency Internation.

The headline should have made that clear when the story was first published, not 12 hours later after the story has moved off the top of the news.

Frankly, I would have reworked the story too, to make it clear that the numbers go much farther back than Grewal, and I would have done that in the first paragraph.

Unless the goal was to embarrass Grewal and the Conservatives...