What: happen grammar?

I don't want to be a stone-thrower, especially when I usually rattle off a blog post in the shortest time possible and avoid spell checking it, but I feel like I need to say something about the quality of the articles that the Associated Press churns out.

At least once a day, I have to read a sentence more than once, until I realize that it's not my fault for being unable to interpret it; usually there is a word (or words) missing. I think it happens even more frequently with important or breaking stories, and is illustrative of the media's tendency to fall all over itself to be the first to bring the news to our eyes.

Here's an example from today's tragic story of the Hajj stampede:

AP said the bridge, as wide as an eight-lane highway, over the desert plain of Mina.

In this case, it could just be the word 'is' that is missing, but I always wonder what the author/editor was trying to really say. What exactly did they leave out? Why doesn't anyone read the content that they spew forth?