The lead story was about General Motors' internal investigation of why it failed to recall cars with
faulty ignition switches for over a decade, which caused several
deaths. The investigation led to the firing of 15 GM employees. The
headline reads, “GM Places Blame in Recall Mix-up.” One would
expect GM's explanation of its own behavior to be self-serving, but the
headline, by referring to the scandal as a “mix-up,” gives it an
even more benign interpretation than GM's own corporate spin doctors,
who, according to the article, cited “a pattern of 'incompetence
and neglect.'”
A second article concerns long waiting times for medical care at the Veterans Administration. The headline
states, “18 More Deaths Tied to VA Wait List.” The problem with
this headline is the words “tied to.” As the article explains,
it is not yet known whether longer waiting times contributed to these
newly discovered deaths. This headline commits the opposite error of
the GM headline by making the scandal appear worse than it is
presently known to be.
These two cases are consistent with the
possibility that, when wrongdoing is suspected, newspapers give
corporations the benefit of the doubt, but are willing to believe the
worst about government agencies. Of course, the VA doesn't advertise
in the Post-Gazette the way Chevy dealers do.
The worst headlines are those that
imply the exact opposite of the article. On May 16, we read, “FCC Pushes Net Neutrality Proposal.” This is technically correct,
since the FCC's proposal deals with the issue of net neutrality, but
I suspect most readers would infer from this headline that the FCC
was proposing a policy of net neutrality. Only by reading the
article do we find that they are actually proposing an end to net
neutrality by allowing internet
service providers to charge companies such as Netflix higher prices
for faster data transmission, leaving the rest of us with slower
service and potentially higher prices as these companies pass on
their costs to the consumer.
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Headlines are important. Not only do people use them to decide whether to read the article, but they create a first impression that can influence the reader's interpretation of the article. Psychologists call this the prior entry effect. Early information about an object or event has a greater effect on our final impression than later information. Media theorists call it a framing effect. A headline frames a news story by creating an expectation about what information is to follow. Expectations can easily become self-fulfilling prophecies when we see what we expected to see. The word "mix-up" implies that the actions of GM employees were unintentional, even though no event described in the article conforms to the everyday meaning of a "mix-up," in which one object or piece of information is mistaken for another.
How do misleading
headlines get written? My guess is that, under time pressure,
newspaper employees don't always read the articles carefully, but
write headlines based on their own expectations of what will
be in them. These examples imply that more time and thought should be given
to headline-writing.
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