Morning News Mulled
by March 18, 2002 12:00 am 80 views
In December, we poked fun at The Morning News in this column for using a large Page 1 headline on Dec. 12 that stated “Budget Mulled.” The story was about a Fayetteville City Council budget briefing.
The headline was accurate and all. It’s just that “mulled” isn’t the most exciting verb in the dictionary, and we figured people didn’t rush to buy the paper to read about the budget being mulled.
We looked up “mull” in the dictionary and read that, in this sense, it means “to consider at length, ponder.”
Since then, we’ve noticed that “mull” is a pretty common word for the Morning News. In mid-February, we went back through a month of Morning News issues and saw the following headlines: “Enron, Experts Mull New Top Executive,” “Experts: Creditors To Mull Over Enron CEO’s Plan,” “Group Mulls FOI, PSC,” “EU Mulls Beef Testing” and “Experts Mull State’s Recovery.”
All of those headlines were on the front of the business section, so we figure the Morning News folks must think business is mostly about mulling. We didn’t bother to look inside the sections on our quest for mulls.
The Morning News canceled our subscription in late February because of “nonpayment” (obviously a bookkeeping error in our Little Rock office), so we don’t know how many mulls we’ve missed since then.