style madness

[Jonathan Lighter]

I mean journalistic.  This sentence uses the present tense when clearly
only the present perfect makes sense:

"Some feel the actress's frock for the White House Correspondents Dinner
might be inappropriate."

That would be fine if the dinner hadn't happened yet, or if it were still
going on. But it has and it ain't.  The verb should be/have been "might
have been inappropriate."

Here's the Yahoo News referent, but in the time it took to type this
message the headline changed:
http://omg.yahoo.com/photos/2012-white-house-correspondents-dinner-slideshow/

Of course, there are sound business reasons for sticking with the present:
it saves space, it's more thrillingly "now."

JL



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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