Headlines

(Or is it “head lines”?)

Something that I’ve become very conscious of in my writing is the importance of having a good title—what the newspapers call a “headline.”

It really is very important—in both a newspaper and a Blog. A good headline is actually like advertising for your writing—it is supposed to grab a potential readers attention and make them want to read your piece and find out what you are talking about or have to say on a given topic.

I think that I do a pretty good job in producing my own headlines for my posts.

Sometimes I am serious and the title tells you exactly what I’m writing about. Stories like Intemperate Thoughts On Illegal Immigration where I was writing about—guess what—the “Mexican Illegal Immigration” problem. The title seems fairly straightforward to me, and I threw the word “Intemperate” in the mix because I, the self proclaimed “King of political incorrectness”, was going to say some things that the PC crowd and the Democratic left was going to hate and disagree with.

Other times I like to fool around with the titles, using a play on words like when I wrote "Poof" the Magic Dragon about the Karl Rove story disappearing once President Bush nominated John Roberts to the Supreme Court. By the way—I was right wasn’t I—the story did disappear.

Many times I also like to throw in a secondary line in my headline (in smaller text) that is an answer to my own headline question, a follow up statement to the assertion made in the main headline, or a rebuttal to the statement that I made in my headline.

Having said all of that, I would also like to point out that the mainstream media newspapers like the NY Times and news services like the Associated Press seem to have some trouble writing headlines that accurately represent the content of the news story that they introduce.

One of my blog idols, Captain Ed over at Captain’s Quarters pointed out today that the Associated Press takes great pleasure in editorializing in their headlines. By editorializing, I mean that the AP will often write a headline that supports their own agenda and tack it on top of a story that has absolutely no supporting factual meaning in its body of text.

For instance, there is this AP story originally printed under the headline "Ohio Families Fed Up With Loss of Marines." (Note that this is a cached copy of the story because they changed the headline, apparently after Captain Ed and some other bloggers mentioned it’s bias.)

If you read the story, however, nowhere in the interviews with family and friends of the Marines killed over the past few weeks from the same Marine Battalion do you read of anybody saying anything remotely resembling being “FED UP” with the loss of their brothers, sons, and friends. Yes they are sad, but they are also proud.

The AP must have gotten cold feet about their obvious “headline bias” because if you click on this link you will see the new headline: Ohio Families Mourn Troops Killed In Iraq

Quite a bit different from the original, huh?

My point here is this. We can’t simply call up the Associated Press and the major newspapers and tell them to straighten up their act, but you can read PAST THE HEADLINES. In fact, you need to read past the first paragraph to the LAST paragraph, because at least half of the time information buried at the end will qualify or even completely refute everything else written in the story.

If all you do is scan the headlines and swallow the first paragraph of the news, I’m afraid that you are SEVERELY MISINFORMED.

Get my point?