Our slog through some recent WXIA newscasts yielded one remarkable piece by Valerie Hoff, who produced a story Friday about revenue shortfalls in local governments. The piece stood out for its head-spinning use of cliches. In a standup, Hoff managed to utter three of them in just two sentences: “Woodstock is far from the only city feeling the pinch. Cities across metro Atlanta are crunching the numbers and tightening the belt.”  Wow.

For good measure, she added two more as the story concluded: “The solutions (are) hard to swallow,” spectacularly capped with “from some points of view, the glass is still half-full.”