Officials say witnesses reported seeing a black Chevy Cavalier driving at a high speed when the vehicle lost control and collided head-on into a mini van stopped at the red light. (“Phoenix Fire: 9 people hurt following head-on collision,” Fox 10 News, October 19, 2018.)

The vehicle didn’t lose control of anything. The idiot driver lost control.

When officials arrived on scene they found two adults with gun shot wounds and transported to the hospital. (“1 person killed, 1 hospitalized after a shooting in Mesa Saturday morrning,” Fox 10 News, October 20, 2018).

They found two adults transported to the hospital? By teleportation, no doubt.

That’s a “minivan,” by the way. One word. 🙄

“Gunshot,” too, come to think of it. When we say “words of one syllable” around that newsroom, we’re not kidding!

Destiny the cat is recovering with her new foster dad after being shot in the eye with a dart. ( “Valley cat shot in eye with dart recovering,” 12 News, October 20, 2018).

Kseniya Schminke first saw Destiny last Saturday, as she darted into a bush near 32nd Street and Thomas.

Snark! Nice pun there. Did you do that on purpose, dear reporter, or were you high on something? And why was Kseniya darting around in the shrubbery, anyway? The story stumbles on…

“I saw, what I originally thought was a screw driver, but later figured out it was a dart. You could see it’s eye was basically about to fall out. It was sad,” Schminke said.

Is there a reason for the comma between the verb and the object? Apparently not. “It’s eye”? Really, no one ever taught you to proofread? And if you meant “its,” are we talking about the dart’s eye or the screwdriver’s eye? “Basically”? Does this overused and pointless adverb have any meaning here? Don’t make your interviewee sound like a moron unless you intend to do so. Speaking of moronic quotes…

“It’s heartbreaking to realize that a human would do this to a defenseless animal and repeatedly. This person is a serial abuser and this neighborhood needs to be on the lookout and we need to find this person,” Sloan said.

Well, yeah. But what’s really heartbreaking is that people let their cats roam loose to be victimized by other cats, dogs, coyotes, automobiles, and lunatics. This cat would never have been injured if its owners had done the responsible thing and kept it inside or in their own yard. If it’s a feral cat, it would never have been injured if its predeceessors’ owners had spayed them.

Study: Arizona in the middle for politically-engaged states (KTAR News: October 21, 2018)

“A recent study from Wallet Hub found that Arizona was in the middle for states and their respective political engagement.”

Huh? What on earth is meant by “respective political engagement”?

No hyphen after an -ly word, by the way: politically engaged.

 Here are the differences among iPhone map programs (KTAR News, October 20, 2018)

“Anyone that was using an iPhone when they initially launched the Apple app remembers the widespread reports of incorrect directions along with lots of bugs and errors.”

We should know about bugs and errors…we certainly sprinkle our copy with plenty of them. 😀

Possibly the reporter meant “anyone who”? Who is a perfectly innocent non-gendered pronoun, and it works well to suggest you’re writing about a human being, not a one-eyed cat or a speeding Chevrolet.

“They”…the users launched the Apple app? Well, obviously the writer intended to refer to the Apple Corporation with the misbegotten “they.” But a corporation is an “it,” not a “they.”

You have to give KTAR credit, though: as infotainment goes, this bêtise-laden passage takes the cake! Not bad. Not bad at-tall…in the not good department, that is.

Too hilarious!