Journalistic Quality

It's been so quiet around here... aren't there some conspiracy theories out there that we need to be made aware of?

My AP English teacher would have had a fit about this sentence:

Government engineers performing sonar tests at the site of a major levee failure confirmed that steel reinforcements barely went more than half as deep as they were supposed to...

Wha? Someone needs to re-edit that, or maybe just try to make it less sensational.

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