I couldn’t have said it much better than Mike Turner, who called from Delray Beach.
“My concern and comment this morning (Tuesday) is over an article that you have starting on the front page and continuing on Page 5,” he said. “On the right-hand side above the fold, it says, ‘Election, religious rulings favor GOP,’ (with secondary headline) ‘Justices lift a corporate-paid ads ban and shield faith-based initiative from suits.’ The byline is by David G. Savage of Los Angeles Times.
“My concern is about the meaning of the headline that you have in there, ‘Election, religious rulings favor GOP.’ When you get down to the fourth paragraph, the true story by Mr. Savage says: ‘The ads often were paid for with corporate or union money.’ Corporate or union money,” Mr. Turner repeated. “Yet your headline says ‘Justices lift a corporate-paid ads ban and shield faith-based initiative from suits.’
“On Page 5, in the fifth paragraph down,” he said, “it reiterates this once again: ‘The ruling concerns the provision in the law that prohibited broadcast message ads 60 days before an election that mentioned the name of a candidate and were paid for by corporate or union money.’ Corporate or union money,” Mr. Turner again repeated.
“Now I realize that you did not write and (Managing Editor Bill) Rose did not write this article,” Mr. Turner said. “But someone in your paper wrote the headline.” And in an increasingly heard criticism of “the media,” he perceived that an editors’ own views manifested themselves in that title.
I agree with Mr. Turner’s observation that the headline was “at best a half-truth.” We diverge at his view that the intent of the headline writer was “to completely mislead anyone who doesn’t read the story, and doesn’t read it in detail.” My sense was editors weren’t alert to what seemed to me a gross oversimplification, implicit in his query: “Why would that headline not have said, ‘Justices lift a corporate- and union-paid ads ban’?”
For his benefit and that of other readers, I asked Mr. Rose about it. “Much of the debate on this issue has revolved around corporate contributions,” he said. “We did not leave unions out of the headline because of bias. If bias had been driving the headline, if we wanted to hide the union angle, we certainly would not have written the headline we ran on the jump page: ‘Ruling will spur businesses, unions to pay for election ads, professor says.’
“And we certainly would not have run that fourth paragraph of the same story on the same front page,” added Mr. Rose. “The one that said ‘the ads were often paid with corporate or union money.’
“Sure, it would have been better to somehow get ‘unions’ in that headline on the front page,” said Mr. Rose. He also reminded that “the very nature of headlines – summing up an often complicated story in a few words – can make that difficult.”
While we’re on this subject of headlines, no reader called about the title above the lead story in many Local News editions that same day. But “Private life of official is news” struck me as one of the weirdest in a while.
Of course, by definition, a news organization’s editors determine what is news. Here, the paper seemed to be making an assertion of that fact, rather than reporting the news, such as it was. A secondary headline conveyed the key elements of the story: “A Riviera Beach councilman is in court to press battery charges against his domestic companion.”
As Mr. Rose says, the main title “should have not run in The Palm Beach Post. The headline should have focused on something in the story. Moreover, it stated an editorial opinion (that a public official’s private life is news), and we do not want editorial opinions in news story headlines.”
These examples recall two of the fundamental findings in the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ comprehensive study of public attitudes about media credibility:
“The public suspects that the points of view and biases of journalists influence what stories are covered and how they are covered.”
And, “The public believes that newspapers chase and over-cover sensational stories because they’re exciting and they sell papers. They don’t believe the stories deserve the attention and play they get.”
That study, done in 1999, suggests that editors must pay more attention today.
Readers obviously do.
Not exempt from that reminder to pay attention is your friendly neighborhood Listening Post editor. It was gratifying to receive the responses to last week’s column, “Why just the black fathers?,” about the Accent section’s excellent photo-feature Some of your thoughts may appear on the letters page.
Proving again, however, that Solomon doesn’t work here, much less produce this column, is my mea culpa. I said it should have been noted up front, rather than on the continuation page, that the outstanding photo-essay spread had been inspired by a newly published book on African-American fathers. In fact, that was stated in the lead-in below the headline atop the Accent front, and again in a paragraph near the bottom. Which means at least one reader – me – read it, twice, and it didn’t sink in.
Thanks also for your thoughts on coverage of the lesser-known presidential candidates, which I plan to address.
