I had to laugh a bit when I saw the headline on an op-ed pitch I received via email from a national syndicate group recently.
“Political violence — point-counterpoint,†it read.
If that’s all someone saw, they just might assume one op-ed is denouncing political violence and the other is openly extolling the virtues of the concept. That would’ve been a new one on me, even in an era when we use the word “unprecedented†12 times a day.
Of course, neither column was promoting political violence as a positive, productive way to cut through all of the crap of civility and pretending to listen to people with differing ideologies. Both authors denounced political violence while blaming the other side of their particular political alignment for creating the environment that allows it to happen. Nothing ground-breaking there, but, in this case, that’s kind of a relief.
Still, the whole thing made me think about how news is presented and consumed, especially online. In a time when we’re bombarded with breaking news on social media and our attention spans are consistently eroding, it’s easy to just read the headline, leave a nasty comment if so inclined and move on to the next thing.
One of the major problems here is that the story might not even be legit, but could be adopted as fact all the same if a reader doesn’t take the time to figure out where it came from. Another issue is that headlines, again, online in particular, are often sensationalized click bait. The story itself might not deliver anything close to what the headline promised. Headlines can also be a bit tricky, making a reader think a story is about something that might affirm a certain bias when it’s actually not.
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There’s an online compilation of a right-wing podcaster falling victim to this again and again. He’s streaming live, and he’ll pull up a story because the headline proclaims the financial ruin of a company that went “woke,†but then, as he reads it, he stumbles along the line that the company made billions of dollars in profits last year, and he’ll quickly exit the story and pivot.
Dude, just read the story beforehand. It’s not hard to find something, scrupulous or not, that supports a particular point of view on the internet (likely up to and including something that really is nakedly pro-political violence, if that’s your thing).
I realize this might seem a bit rich coming from someone whose content you can only read if you pony up to get past the website paywall, purchase a subscription to have a print newspaper delivered to your house or buy a copy off a rack. I get that many people only see the headline because they can’t or would rather not pay for the content. And I know that, sometimes, headlines from local news outlets can be a bit more sizzle than steak. That’s the nature of a headline. It’s supposed to make a reader want to read the whole story.
Feel free to disagree with me, but, after 25 years in the business, I find that headlines from local news outlets generally do their job well and honestly. If anything, they sometimes undersell what’s within. But it’s still just a headline, constrained by and configured to fit in the space allotted, whether that be in a print product or a social media post. A headline is never supposed to be the whole story.
Look, we’re all busy and might not have the time for a deep-dive piece into a complicated issue. Also, many of us, myself included, aren’t exactly flush with extra cash to throw around. Even I get frustrated with paywalls when trying to read a story from another news outlet. But if, for whatever reason, you can only read the headline, try not to form any solid opinions on an issue based solely on a few words that can only hope to imply a general summation of the full content. Unlike those multi-page, online consent forms that I regularly click “agree†on without giving the text a glance, there’s good and important stuff in here (written by people who aren’t me) beyond the bold type.
