Headline News

Although newspapers get most of their national and international news from larger newspapers or wire services, headlines are written locally either by editors or headline-writing specialists. Friday's (June 6) front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette contains two headlines I consider misleading.

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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