Why wrong words matter too

It's the bane of athletes and actors that regular people look up to them. They become heroic and we want to emulate their behavior and "Be Like Mike!". That's one thing if your hero is Michael Jordan. It's another if you look up to Placico Burress.

The same principle holds true for the public journalism figures we see or read each day. George Bush unfortunately dropped the bar on communication low enough to be a tough limbo move. Entire books exist of "Bushisms" so the president's misuse of the language can be neither gone nor forgotten.

But there are new examples each day from people who ought to know better. Periodically, we'll call those out here because when people who make their living from communicating can't use the language correctly, it sends a bad message to a new generation of communicators coming up that precision in language really doesn't matter. After all, people will figure out what you meant and isn't that the most important thing?

All of us, anyone who has ever been misunderstood or had their words twisted to mean something unintended knows that the right words matter.

Today's example of the wrong words come from CNN's Roland Martin during his 8 p.m. broadcast on Friday night. The story: The tragic mass murder of 14 immigrants in a Binghampton, NY, civic center. Dozens of people huddled in the basement and hid in closets and storage rooms while the gunman upstairs killed their colleagues, friends and relatives in a classroom. Martin said (apparently reading their minds) that as they waited out the massacre "they wondered if they would make it out dead or alive."

Amidst the horror of the story, this throw away comment stood out look a sore thumb. First, I hope I'm not alone in wishing that journalists would stop trying to guess what is going on in their subjects' heads. Second, I doubt that any of the 26 immigrants crouched together listening to screams and gun fire, would consider that they "made it out" if "out" was feet first.

Words do matter - even off the cuff ones.