ESPN, you’re better than that.

I was surfing ESPN this morning, and when I hit the NBA page, I saw the following headline:

Yao still shaken by China’s earthquake tragedy

Journalists love to write clever headlines that use puns or wordplay to grab the reader. But when there are more than 62,000 confirmed dead in one of the world’s biggest disasters in recent memory, there’s no need to use the term “shaken” when describing Yao Ming’s feelings about the earthquake. To put things in perspective, about 2,541 people died (or are missing) as a result of Hurricane Katrina. You do the math.

This is no time to be clever.