Urban Legend: Image shows Bush as one of the worst disasters to hit the U.S.

True. (hee hee)

Captions accompanying television news broadcasts have to convey information about often complex topics in relatively few words, a situation which can sometimes produce inadvertently humorous ambiguity.

The screen shot displayed above, presumably captured from a Sky News (Ireland) broadcast, uses a text caption in conjunction with a video clip of President Bush to convey that the President had declared Hurricane Katrina to be "one of the worst disasters to hit the U.S." Without the video context however, the caption could be read as labeling President Bush "one of the worst disasters ever to hit the U.S.," especially given the lack of quotation marks to offset the phrase and indicate it was a paraphrase of his words rather than the news agency's descriptor.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Photo Gallery (Worst Disaster)

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