I am guessing that many will skip over this edition of The Grandstander, but I came across something while reading the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette yesterday that bugs me, and I surely can't be the only one.
The Post-Gazette's style policy, for lack of a better term, dictates that after a person is initially identified in a news story, he or she is then referred to throughout the balance of the story as Mr., Mrs., Miss, or Ms. Thus, Mayor Ed Gainey becomes "Mr. Gainey" and actress Meryl Streep becomes "Miss Streep" and so on. The exception to this seems to be on sports pages where Coach Mike Tomlin becomes "Tomlin", Sydney Crosby becomes "Crosby" and so on. With me so far?
Anyway, Tuesday's PG offered a front page story from sports columnist Ron Cook on the state of the Steelers going forward after Sunday's playoff loss. The story was labeled as "Commentary", and it followed the PG's style policy and was peppered with references to people like Mr. Tomlin, Mr. Roethlisberger, Mr. Rooney and so on. Turn to the sports section and columnist Joe Starkey wrote his version of the same story, but the honorific of "Mr." was nowhere to be seen. Just continued references to Tomlin, Freiermuth, Harris, Mahomes, et cetera.
Personally, I find the continued references to Mr., Mrs, Miss, and Ms throughout a story to be unnecessary and annoying, but if that is the policy, why doesn't it apply on the sports pages? Had Ron Cook's "commentary" been printed on the sports pages, which it very well could have, would all of the "Misters" been scrubbed out of it? Don't get me wrong, I don't want to spend the upcoming summer reading "Mr. Shelton's" continued explanations as to why the Pirates lost another one, but I'd also prefer not to read a news story where some jamoke who was arrested as a suspect in a triple homicide is respectfully referred to as Mr. ______ in the news article.
In all fairness, I believe that this is fairly standard style policy among newspapers throughout the land, but it still bugs me.
Having said all that, I think that there should be one exception to the "No-Mister" deal, and that is when heads of state are involved. Joe Biden and Boris Johnson (or any of their predecessors; this has nothing to do with politics) should be referred to as President Biden and Prime Minister Johnson or simply "the President" or "the Prime Minister" in news stories as a matter of respect to the offices that they hold.
Anyone else with me on this?
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