Misleading Headlines - Some Examples, Some Newspaper History

Appeals court tosses murder conviction in 2010 Anchorage mall shooting.

Before you read any further, stop and articulate what that headline means.

That headline had me thinking that a person convicted of murder was about to be set free.  Or would have to have another trial.  Last November an Anchorage judge was voted out of office because of a debate over a no-jail time sentence for someone convicted of sexual assault.  So maybe that was my context.  Not again??!!

Actually, if you read far enough (10th paragraph of an 11 paragraph story) into the article, you'll find this:

"The court wrote in its opinion that prosecutors can either decide to retry Gray on the original second degree murder charge or have the Superior Court enter an alternative connection [conviction] for manslaughter, which is the crime Gray would have been convicted on if the jury had decided in his favor on the 'heat of passion' defense."

So, he's still been convicted of manslaughter.  He's not walking.  Was this headline just written too quickly?  Was it intentionally written this way to get people to read about yet another outrage from the courts? (I guess I should make it clear I'm being ironic in my use of 'outrage'.)


Here's another one:



Manafort sentenced to nearly four years in prison

Again, I want you to pause and reflect on what this means.  (I'm sort of testing - maybe I'm all wrong here.)   OK, now go below the image for my thoughts.

Here my beef is with the word 'nearly'.  It means 'almost, but not quite.'  I regularly see headlines that talk about 'almost ten years' or 'more than ten years' or 'for the first time in two years.'  All these phrases imply that something is a lot, or not very much, or a big deal.  When in actuality, who cares if this is the warmest temperature in two years, or the biggest stock market drop in three months?  Twenty years might be meaningful, but I usually fail to understand why things are worded this way, except to make it sound more important than it is.

Manafort's sentence was seen by most legal experts to be surprisingly short.  Yet 'nearly four years' to someone who doesn't know anything about the Manafort case makes it sound like he got a long sentence.  It was, my goodness, nearly four years!  Yes, "nearly four years" is factually correct (it was 47 months), but so is 'less than four years."  But the one  implies the sentence is a long one and the other that it's not that long.  The Anchorage Daily News, it would appear, simply copied the headline on a story it got from the Washington Post, and if you google 'nearly four years' today, you'll get a bunch of papers that copied the same headline.

Why not just say 47 months?  It uses almost half* the characters, which is always good in a headline.  Are they worried that people don't know that 48 months equals four years?  (Probably not a bad assumption, I'm afraid.)
*Yes, here my point was to emphasize that it's significantly less to write 47 months.

Listen to broadcasters - including NPR - and watch headlines and think about how the media use words around numbers to make them seem too high or too low.  Some of this is accurate and useful, some, I'm sure, is just mindless - they aren't paying attention to the innuendo.  Some of it is probably intentional to make something sound better or worse than it is, or to generate clicks.

Sensational and/or misleading headlines have been used to sell papers in the US from the beginning.  Or so I thought.  But a piece on early newspapers says they didn't have headlines.   Lurid headlines came later.   This comes from an article that offers some historical context at Gizmo:  A History of Clickbait:  The First Hundred Years.

Yellow journalism came of age during the period when William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal was competing for circulation numbers with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Things got so heated in their war for eyeballs that both papers would take any opportunity to turn the boring daily news into sensational, Earth-shattering events. That's one way that the sinking of the U.S. vessel Maine [1898] in a Cuban harbor went from an accidental explosion to a possible attack by Spain.

From the Colonial Williamsburg site (same one that said there were no headlines in the early papers):

As the century [1700] began, the fledgling colonial press tested its wings. A bolder journalism opened on the eve of the Revolution. And, as the century closed with the birth of the United States, a rancorously partisan and rambunctious press emerged. 

The eras can be traced in the history of the family of Benjamin Franklin—the preeminent journalist of his time. But it best begins with another Boston newspaperman, postmaster John Campbell. In 1704, Campbell served up The Boston News-Letter, the nation's second paper. It was a publication the powers-that-be could stomach. The News-Letter lasted seventy-two years, succeeding in an increasingly competitive industry, supported by the growth of communication and of commerce. 

Campbell's fellow postmasters often became newspaper publishers, too; they had ready access to information to put on their pages. Through their offices came letters, government documents, and newspapers from Europe. Gazettes were also started by printers, who had paper, ink, and presses at hand. Franklin was a postmaster and a printer.  [emphasis added]

The article goes on to say that much of what they printed was extracted from other sources - like newspapers from Europe.  Not unlike much of social media and even mainstream media today.  And while one motivation may have been to do good, money was a key goal.

"Julie K. Williams, a history instructor at Alabama's Samford University, said publishers had such altruistic motives as improving communication and educating the public, but profit was their primary purpose. Maurine Beasley, a University of Maryland journalism professor, puts it plainly. The purpose of newspapers was 'to make money.'" 

Getting a daily paper out everyday is no easy task.  Making sure everything is spelled right and headlines reflect what's in each story is a constant challenge.  But typos that don't change the meaning are one thing.  Headlines that are misleading are another altogether.  Lots of readers don't read beyond the headline.  So headline writers need to be particularly careful.