WHEN AN ACTOR IS NOT AN ACTOR

Thursday’s edition of The Citizen, a community newspaper in Houston, covered a story with the following heading:

Actor charged in shooting at Galveston bar

Before reading the story, I wondered whether Alec Baldwin, Charlie Sheen or even Russell Crowe had come down to Galveston and gotten into another one of their famous brawls. But when I read the story I had a really good belly laugh.

It would seem that an idiot reporter read a police report from the Galveston County Sheriff’s Department about a couple of drunks feuding in the Tiki Bar with one gut-shooting the other. The police report obviously referred to the shooter as the ‘actor.’

Quoting from the story: The actor, Mark Anthony Martino, 56, of Tiki Island, was identified as the shooter ...

The reporter must be unaware that some years ago, in order to be politically correct, police agencies stopped using the term ‘suspect’ in their police reports, using ‘actor’ instead. The politically correct crowd had declared that it was politically incorrect to label a suspect a suspect.

I do not know who is more ignorant, the reporter or the editor of The Citizen who let this big boner slip through.

While I had a good laugh at that reporter’s stupidity, I was sorely disappointed that Alec Baldwin, Charlie Sheen or Russell Crowe had not been involved in a shootout at one of Galveston’s many shit-kicking bars.