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Here’s an excerpt from one of the earlier stories about Larry Birkhead being the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby:

NASSAU (Reuters) - A former boyfriend, Larry Birkhead, was identified on Tuesday as the father of Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith’s 7-month-old daughter after DNA test results were released by a Bahamas court.

The revelation brought to an appropriately dramatic climax a tabloid maelstrom that was kicked off by the abrupt death of the buxom widow of a billionaire from an accidental drug overdose in a Florida hotel casino on February 8.

This mess is what happens when you’re arrogant about your subject — or, more accurately, trying to talk down the subject.

Read literally, the second paragraph implies that J. Howard Marshall, Smith’s billionaire second husband, was made a billionaire “from an accidental drug overdose in a Florida hotel casino on February 8.”

The problem here is that the reporter, and clearly the desk editors, believe they are better than the story they are reporting. And they’re trying to prove how much better they are by torturing adjectives and dependent clauses, cramming 10 pounds of veiled invective into a 5-pound sentence.

Note the weasel words: “tabloid maelstrom”, implying that the story was driven not by the mainstream media, but by showbiz rags. Of course, Reuters moved over a dozen stories about Smith in the week prior to this story, so is Reuters a tabloid wire service? Then there’s “appropriately dramatic climax,” which isn’t even true, because anyone paying any amount of attention could clearly divine, by the actions of the parties involved, that Birkhead was the father. If anything, the test results are prosaic. Now, had Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband turned out to be the dad. …

Also note that my preceding paragraph is very complex, but can be understood perfectly. There are no dependent clauses defining the wrong thing. I broke for a sentence when a new thought arose. The adjectives are kept to a minimum. Where clarity was needed, I turned to nouns and verbs.

If the reporter and editors assigned to this story think the issue isn’t newsworthy, they can quit. Clearly, none of them are clever enough to either mask their disdain for the subject or reveal their biases in a way that doesn’t embarrass themselves, rather than the subject. And that, alone, should be reason enough for Reuters to fire everyone involved in this report.