Be Careful What Somebody Else Eats.

There’s a news item up on the BBC TV text channel entitled ‘Woman Dies After Serving Obama.’ It tells of a restaurant worker in Ohio who suffered a heart attack and died a few hours after serving the President breakfast during a campaign stop.

It’s obvious that the death of an ordinary restaurant worker from natural causes is only deemed newsworthy because of the circumstantial connection with the US President, so what I found interesting was the final sentence of the report:

‘The President arrived at the restaurant at about 0830 EST, ordering two eggs (over easy,) bacon and wheat toast.’

The conclusion of a news report – as with any piece of writing – is important, so are we meant to draw some decisive inference from the President’s choice of meal? Would the poor woman have survived, for example, had the eggs not been over easy? Or could it be that the news-reading public is more interested in what the President had for breakfast than it is in the death of an ordinary restaurant worker? Or does the writer simply not understand what ‘irrelevance’ means?

But let’s not be too quick to blame the BBC. It’s almost certain that this report would have been syndicated from an American source and reproduced verbatim. If Cameron were to make a breakfast stop at a British café, it’s more likely that he would be the one to succumb to a lethal dose of hemlock poisoning. All the rain we’ve had this year has made it a good one for hemlock.

Nudge, nudge...