The Six Headline Tactics that Should Drive You Bananas
Originally published on October 14, 2021.
TRANSCRIPT: This is Baffled with David DesRoches and this is episode three, and it's called the Six Headline Tactics That Should Drive You Bananas.
I just want to remind listeners about the lens that I'm going to use when I examine a news story. I laid it all out in episode one, the title of that episode is the Seven Lies that Journalists Want You to Believe, and you haven't heard that one, please go back and listen to it because I feel like it will give you an idea for how my mind works and how I'll approach this podcast
And please also check out episode two, The Four Reasons Why Journalists Should Not Defend Democracy. I know, I know. I'm pretty much guaranteeing I never return to journalism after those two episodes. But hey, what can I say? Apparently, I'm a man who loves a good self-flagellation.
Anyway, this episode is going to be a little different from the other two episodes. Whereas the other two talked more about the philosophy behind my criticism of the practice of journalism, this one's going to talk more about concrete things that exist in-part because of the things I talked about before.
First, a little context. It's no surprise that journalism has undergone some drastic changes over the last score and a quarter years... score and a quarter, I think Lincoln would be proud! No? Anyway, things have changed over the last 25 years. There are fewer jobs out there for journalists. There's more misinformation and disinformation than ever before. Social media is a dominant force in the information ecosystem, and the public's trust of journalists is at an all time low.
Amid all this dramatic change, journalistic practices have also changed, in some good ways, arguably, but sadly, I would say that, generally speaking, the changes have not been for the best. And the things that really need to change, well, they're still unchanged.
This episode is about bad changes, specifically headline writing. Just the other day I came across a headline in my Facebook news feed for a CNN article. The headline read: “Donald Trump Is 100% Right About Stacey Abrams.”
Now, for anyone mildly paying attention, that headline is an attention-grabber. Stacey Abrams is a Black Democratic candidate for G=governor of Georgia, and Donald Trump is Donald Trump. The last time he endorsed a Democrat was probably in the 90s when he pretended to be a Democrat.
But like so many headlines these days, it was all bait, and the article was an empty plate. The CNN piece then goes on to say how Trump mockingly said Stacey Abrams would be a better governor than the Republican candidate, the current governor, Brian Kemp.
Other news headlines about this, even other ones from CNN, were far more accurate and included the mockery line, or at least alluded to it. But this one struck me because of its unbridled distortion. First of all, Trump said it, so, you know he was joking. The man who never laughs is somehow always joking, especially about heated topics. Secondly, if you take the headline at face value and don't realize it's clickbait, it's implying that what Trump is actually correct about, is his choice to mock Abrams’s candidacy.
Especially if you're already familiar with the story, because if the headline were to be read as factually accurate, then that is what one should conclude. Of course, that's not the case, but how are we, the audience supposed to know otherwise? Aren't we supposed to assume that headlines are accurate and factual, especially from a news organization that claims to be doing real journalism, like CNN?
CNN used this headline solely because they knew it would be provocative. They knew that their audience generally leans left and would find that headline so incredulous that they would have to click on it. I did. They got me, that's for sure. Not because I lean left, but because I know that they lean left. They, meaning CNN.
What is Trump 100% right about, I thought. Had he ever been right about anything, according to CNN?
Headlines. Headlines actually drive me bananas. A whole tree full of overripe, mushy bananas. The most famous of all headline blunders, probably – or the most infamous, I guess – is probably the “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline from the Chicago Daily Tribune back in 1940. Truman obviously won that election, and that photo of him smiling a huge FU grin while holding up the paper that falsely announced his loss is a timeless classic. And before I piss off all the headline writers out there, let's just take a minute to set the table.
The evolution of the headline has been pretty dramatic over the decades. Today, they are arguably the number one reason people share an article. Now research about sharing articles is all over the place. Some studies say that two-thirds of article shares on Twitter are shared without the person even reading the article. Other surveys have found that about two in 10 people only read the headlines, while other findings showed that it was six in 10 people that only read headlines, so the data here is all over the place. (CORRECTION: I misspoke here; I should have said “only two in 10 people actually read the article,” or “eight out of 10 people only read the headlines.”).
But common sense tells you that a story's headline plays a huge role in attracting someone's attention. That, and whatever graphic image is tied to the story, are probably the two biggest things.
Now it might help our conversation if we think about headlines as falling into different categories or types. That way we can better understand what makes them good, bad or plain terrible.
Types of Headlines
The Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin breaks them down into five types, which I kind of like, and there are as follows. They're traditional headlines, which give a general overview of the story. Like, “U.S. soldiers told to ignore Afghan allies’ abuse of boys.” That's one headline. Then there are the more creative headlines that use puns, like the LA Times story, “Big rig carrying fruit crashes on 210 freeway, creates jam”.
I just love that, creates jam. And then there are headlines that essentially serve as an introduction to the actual story. Like the AP headline: “Prisoner worker who helped two killers escape gets up to seven years.”
And then there are forward-referencing, or cliffhanger headlines, that foreshadow what the article’s about, like the CNN headline: “Food stamps don't buy diapers, so one mom did this.”
And of course, the most infamous of all headline types, the sensational headline, which exaggerates the truth to lure readers in, like the CBS News Headline: “Mom’s Facebook Warning: Kissing Baby Led to Herpes.”
So that's essentially five styles of headlines. Of course, they're not exclusive to each other, and one headline could obviously contain elements of two or more of these types, but you get the picture.
I'd like to add a sixth and seventh type of headline to that list, the sixth being the click-bait headline and the seventh being the compound headline, or you could also call it, the stand-alone-narrative headline.
Now for the clickbait headline. These kinds of headlines are all over the place, and while most of us probably ignore them, certainly some of us click on them at least sometimes. After all, if nobody clicked on them, they wouldn't exist. And, I have to admit, headlines like: “Eat this simple fruit once a week and it will add 20 years to your life”... It sounds ridiculous, of course, but it does speak to my inner desire to live past my expiration date.
And that's why they're so enticing, right? They play to our primal fears and desires. In fact, there's an entire consulting industry built around helping people write headlines that attract clicks, and they probably all would tell you that playing to people's fears and desires is probably the best way to get their attention and subsequently get their click.
Click-bait headlines have traditionally only been used by content farms looking for clicks and ad money. That is, until the last couple of years. Now we see legacy media organizations using these techniques. We'll talk more about that in a little bit.
And a seventh headline type, is the “stand alone narrative” or compound headline, and these are becoming increasingly popular because it seems to be like a little mini-story, all in bold letters. And sometimes it's more than one sentence, like, for example: “Arizona's governor banned school mask mandates. Now some students are sick and parents are angry.” That was the New York Times headline.
It works for what it's being used for, as a mobile alert. But we see these kinds of headlines all the time, like this one from Business Insider: “The female anchor who interviewed a Taliban official said he showed up at her studio uninvited and she felt lucky to be already wearing loose clothing.”
A lot of information in the headline, but you can really only use it in the digital space. We could probably talk about types of headlines ad nauseam, but let's get into some of the problems that you can drive me bananas and maybe they irk you too.
As always, if you agree with me, or if you think I've lost my mind, I want to hear from you. You can find me on Twitter @savingEJ. You can shoot me an e-mail at david.desroches@qu.edu. You can also follow the Quinnipiac University podcast accounts on Instagram and Twitter, the handle is @QUpodcasts.
Tactic 1: Overuse of Fear
Now the first headline tactic that drives me pounds of bananas is the overuse of fear tactics. Take this headline from NBC Connecticut, which was posted in the hours before Hurricane Henri was scheduled to make landfall earlier this year. The headline was as follows: “Henri makes its way to CT as category one hurricane, some may lose power for three weeks.”
There are so many things wrong with this headline, I don't know where to start. First of all, it not only uses fear, it's also ambiguous and loaded with assumptions and lacking evidence. I know, I know it's only a headline, but if it's going to make these grand claims, it should be supported. And if you live in Connecticut, you recall that Hurricane Henri barely touched the state. Instead, it made landfall in Rhode Island. Now, it's perfectly OK for meteorologists to predict the incorrect path. I mean, who actually expects weather people to be right? I know I don't.
But again, the headline: “Henri makes its way to CT as a category one hurricane, some may lose power for three weeks.” But Henri wasn't making its way to CT – that is factually inaccurate. It appeared to be making its way to CT. Something doing something and appearing to do something are two very different things, and that distinction is not trivial. It's actually very important.
Not only because it's a more accurate reflection of the truth in that particular moment, but also because it couches the understanding; it provides a gray area. Now I know we all crave certainty, but the weather, much like life in general, is packed with uncertainty. It's a world full of shades of gray and very little black and white.
Maybe a better version of that headline could be something like: “Forecasters say that Henri appears to be headed to Connecticut...” appears to be headed to Connecticut.
But they don't. Instead, they make a finite statement, which essentially means the hurricane’s coming to Connecticut. But it didn't come to Connecticut. The headline gets even worse. The writers wrote that “some may lose power.” What in the hell does “some” mean? Three? A thousand? One hundred thousand? Who said that some may lose power anyway? There's no attribution in the headline. They could have at least had scientists predict some will lose power, or, “Our sometimes-wrong weatherman says some will lose power.”
They could tell us why this is a possibility, right? It's not like they lack the space to include why, it’s the damn internet!
But they stuck with the ambiguous “some,” to leave everyone wondering: “Will I be among the some to lose power for three weeks?”
And what exactly was the point of including that last bit of information about losing power for three weeks? My God, what is the goal of that piece of information? Do they expect people to just say, “oh, that's good to know,” and then go about their lives expecting to lose power for nearly a month, and just suck it up and deal with it? And during the hottest month of the year? Or are they expecting people to lose their minds and go out, buy a ton of toilet paper? Or maybe look in vain for a generator if they can even afford one? Or encourage people to leave the state in droves? What is the goal of that last bit of information?
The goal was, in my opinion, not to do any of that, but the goal is to get people to click on the article and share it. That's it. Now I don't know about you, but I'm afraid of enough things in this life, I'm afraid of losing my job, losing my house, my future wife, my own life. I I'm afraid of people who don't get vaccinated because they think Bill Gates will start tracking their movements. I'm afraid of a lot of things. I'm afraid of enough, right? I don't need to be afraid of losing power for almost a month. And I certainly don't want to spread that fear to others.
We're probably also afraid of too many things. Leave us alone, damn you!
But fear is a big motivator. If you consider Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, just give that to google if you're unfamiliar. But Maslow's hierarchy is essentially a pyramid of needs, with the foundational needs like food, shelter at the bottom of the pyramid, and as long as you have those, as long as you have the basic needs, your needs become more nuanced and complex as you move up the pyramid. Like relationships, respect from other, purpose, you get the point.
Now fear is a primal emotion. It could challenge those foundational needs. If I don't have shelter, for example, how could I have a relationship with others? How could I have purpose? And a headline that basically says that there's a chance your shelter will be, for all intents and purposes, uninhabitable for three weeks? Well, it triggers that fear. And then, like wildfire, that fear spreads. You share the article, others share it, and the fear’s stoked. And then the hurricane never comes. Is your fear abated, or does that fear turn into anger or hostility toward those who made you so afraid to begin with? And for no good reason!
I'd argue that a large number of people get angry at journalists for headlines like this. It's headlines like these that only contribute to the fake news claims that get thrown around like beads at Mardi Gras. If actual journalists create headlines that are just plain wrong, it gives ignorant critics more fuel to claim everything we do is fake. And again, our trust diminishes.
It's OK for the weather forecast to be wrong. It happens pretty frequently, but it's not OK to stoke fear in your audience for the sake of clicks. It's just not. And again, it's part of the reason why people are losing trust in journalists, because they feel manipulated.
One of the key tenets of being a journalist is to minimize harm, and we fail miserably at that when we unnecessarily stoke fear for clicks.
Tactic 2: The Bait-and-Switch
The second type of headline that tends to drive me bonkers is the bait and switch. Maybe you've come across this in the past. You click on the headline, which seems straightforward enough, like this one from publicsource.org, it's a Pittsburgh news site. The headline reads: “Technology is changing the millennial brain.” Now, I'm fascinated. For one, this headline immediately confirms my bias about millennials, which is that they – or we, if I'm included, I don't even know, I'm on the generational cusp – the bias is that millennials were exposed to computers when their brains were primed for growth. And so they've been on the leading edge of tech exposure ever since. So right away, I believe the headline not because it's true, but because it confirms my bias. We talked about this type of bias in episodes one and two.
But if you click the headline, again which reads: “Technology is changing the millennial brain,” you learn in the ninth paragraph that the headline was completely misleading. Here's the ninth paragraph in that story:
“ I think it's very possible that technology alters the brain,” said Kirk Erickson, principal investigator of the brain aging and Cognition Health Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. “But we haven't yet directly linked these things.”
Let me repeat that, he says: “We haven't yet directly linked these things.” In other words, they don't know if technology is altering the millennial brain, yet that is exactly what the headline said!
I'd argue the headline writers wrote that because if they wrote, “technology may be altering the millennial brain,” they probably wouldn't get the same number of clicks. That's because many people would see that and be like, “well yeah, duh,” and not click it. But by being definitive, falsely definitive, the headline sparks your curiosity. Instead of saying to yourself, “well, yeah, duh,” now you're saying, “Oh crap, I wonder how it's changed?” At least that's how I reacted.
Now, the really egregious examples of the bait-and-switch happen with those ads that appear on news websites, but they look like articles. You know, there's a photo and headline in the format that's a little bit different from the news articles, but it's similar. And those things are full of bait-and-switches. I recently went to a news website and found one that said: “The Best Song of all time is mostly forgotten,” and it had an old photo of a young John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and I thought, “Oh, that's interesting.” I clicked it.
And it took me to a page where the new headline read: “The best songs of all time according to critics and fans.” And it was one of those click-through articles where you read a sentence or two and then just click to the next song. I guess they get paid by click, I don't know. But geez, it just seems sinister.
Now I know this "article” was solely made to generate money and it wasn't really made to inform anyone, but still the link to it was on a reputable news company’s website. So why be so misleading?
Headlines, whether for news or opinion or for an ad, need to be accurate. They can still be catchy, but they have to be accurate. What's the point of misleading people to your site? Are you hoping that they don't actually read the article and prove your headline incorrect? That's an incredible amount of disrespect for your reader. And again, like the earlier example about the hurricane headline, it gives people yet another reason not to trust journalists, and it feeds the flames of the fake news screaming maniacs.
We have to do better. Trust is the only currency journalists have that matters, and fewer people trust journalists now than any other time in the last 50 years, according to Gallup polling.
Another example of the bait and switch headline is this one from the website Interesting Engineering: “Physicists just broke the laser fusion record, generating 700 times the US energy grid.” Oh my God, that's amazing! Free energy’s on the horizon, woo hoo! Well not so fast. It's pretty incredible, right? It turns out the energy was only generated for a nanosecond. Sorry greenies, keep on dreaming.
So don't stoke fear, and on the flip side of that, don't falsely stoke hope. Just be accurate.
Tactic 3: Exaggeration and Sensationalism
That last headline also has some elements of the third thing that drives me crazy about headlines: exaggeration, and sensationalism. Of course, the Emperor of sensationalized news headlines is the infamous New York Post. Now. The Post also has some pretty clever headlines. I was in a story, actually years ago that was headlined: “News You Can Abuse,” and it was about a TV journalist that was verbally abusive to me over the phone after I wrote about him being arrested for beating up his wife.
I think “News You Can Abuse” was pretty clever, but the Post is also guilty of sensationalizing. They recently had this headline: “Taliban co-founder Baradar the Butcher to reportedly lead new Afghan government.”
The article then starts off by saying: “Feared Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was once named Baradar the Butcher, will lead the new Afghan government, sources within the militant group told Reuters.”
Here's where things get weird. If you actually go to the story source, which is the Reuters article mentioned, there is no reference to this guy being nicknamed the Butcher. So, the inference is that the Reuters sources are the ones who confirmed his nickname used to be the Butcher. But again, Reuters didn't include that info.
So let's give the Post the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they have their own sources for that, right? Wrong. The story never once tells you who actually nicknamed him that. If you google “Baradar the Butcher,” at least this is what happened when I did it on September 3rd (2021), the first actual reference to this nickname is the seventh link down, and it's a Fox News story, and below that is The New York Post story that I'm talking about.
In fact, the search results returned three other people who had “butcher” nicknames before getting to the Fox story. In other words, there were other people nicknamed “The Butcher” who appeared before this guy, even though I had typed this guy's actual name in the search.
No other news outlets were calling this guy Baradar the Butcher. Why did Fox and the New York Post choose to do this? Of course they have their right leaning political bent, but at least in the Post’s case, because they had his name in their headline, the Post knows that fear invokes clicks. People are going to be afraid about what's going to happen in Afghanistan now that the Taliban's running things, and the Post just tossed gas on the fire.
Liberal outlets aren't immune to sensationalism or exaggeration, either. They yin to the Post’s yang, The New York Daily News, had this headline on one of its stories: “Crazed homophobe attacks Straphanger on Brooklyn Subway train.”
First of all, and maybe I'm just old, I have no idea what a straphanger is. I guess I need to ride the subway more. And secondly, the person who attacked the straphanger – it might have been a homophobe because of the things he said, but calling him crazy, is that completely necessary? Do we know what this man's life is like? Do we know if he has a history of mental illness? Has he ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia? Is it responsible to call him crazed?
Or is it even responsible to say he's a homophobe? Perhaps he hasn't reconciled his own sexuality, or maybe he was sexually abused as a child and conflates homosexuality with that sort of abuse. Maybe he's truly damaged. So, can we say that he's both crazed and a homophobe? I would argue no. I would also argue that if the man read that article, it might send him into an even deeper craze and encourage him to do something even worse.
Remember that journalistic tenant, minimize harm? Is the New York Daily News minimizing harm?
Don't stoke fear. Be accurate. Stick to the facts. And don't exaggerate.
Tactic 4: Vague Attribution
The fourth thing about headlines that drives me nuts is vague attribution. These are headlines that start or end in, “experts say,” or “sources claim.” First of all, no matter how many people say something, that's their opinion. Experts might think that something is the case, but they also might be wrong. Additionally, you're beginning a story couched in ambiguity. Sure, if you have multiple sources saying something, you should include that in the story body itself. But using an overly generalized and completely subjective subject to drive the headline, we're distancing ourselves from our readers. I'd argue that people don't want expert opinion in a headline. They want an accurate account of the facts.
Of course, unless they disagree with those facts, which is what episode one is all about. But I digress.
Here's a question for us to think about. Why would news reporters use an analysis of a situation as a headline? Why not just use a factual statement? Why insinuate something is a certain way just because a few, “experts” say it is so?
Experts are wrong all the time. Why give them that power? And who's considered an expert? Who gets to decide that? And why do they get that power? Do all experts on this issue agree or are there deep disagreements? All it takes is more than one “expert” to say something, and that becomes “experts,” plural, and more than one expert carries a ton of weight.
I often actually wonder if reporters have theories and then seek multiple people to confirm that theory so it can become the headline. This idea that reporters start with the theory and then work toward proving it is a subject for another episode, but that kind of thinking, I'd argue, also plays into the headlines, especially if the headline includes the vague attribution of experts or sources.
Let's flip that argument. Do journalists ever have a theory about something? Then seek out to completely disprove that theory by seeking experts who don't agree with them, and then writing that story in a subsequent headline with those experts as the experts in the headline.
Maybe, maybe sometimes that happens, but my money is on the opposite happening, far more frequently. Now, sometimes it might be appropriate to have an expert say or source of say in headline, like if they're predicting a natural disaster or if there's an abundance of evidence to point to something being the case, or potentially being the case in the near future. It's not always bad to use this method, but it seems, at least to me, to be overused, and it's overuse – like other headline tactics – distances us from the public.
Nobody knows the future, and we shouldn't have present reports as if we do. All it does is confuse people, and then when what we report doesn't actually happen, like a lot of the coronavirus (reporting) early in the pandemic, well, we lose our trust. People have one more reason to stop trusting journalism.
It's the boy who cried wolf. We need the public to believe us when we tell them that the wolves have arrived.
Don't stoke fear and don't falsely give hope. Be accurate. Stick to facts. Don't exaggerate. Don't try to predict the future with experts.
Tactic 5: The Obsession with Incrementalism
Number five on my list of annoying headline tactics is unnecessary increments. Earlier I mentioned the New York Post and how they called someone Baradar the Butcher. Well, the Post got the information that this man – who they could be defaming, by the way – was going to lead Afghanistan by a report filed by Reuters on September 3rd at 2:33 a.m. Eastern Time.
Reuters posted this headline: “Mullah Baradar to lead new Afghanistan government – Taliban sources.” I guess they didn't get the memo that this guy is Baradar the Butcher, but that's beside the point. The Reuters story was posted with two photos and is two sentences long. Two whole sentences. I'd read it to you now, but it's probably a copyright infringement. Now maybe there are some policy wonks and politicians awake at 2:30 in the morning East Coast time, on what's effectively a Thursday evening, and maybe they get a lot out of that announcement. And I love Reuters, don't get me wrong, they provide an incredible amount of solid and excellent journalism from around the world, but they, like most large news outlets, are obsessed with the increments.
Six hours after they posted that two-sentence story, they posted another one, telling us more about Mullah Baradar and other key figures in the Taliban who will be leading the new Afghan government. Couldn't these stories have been one? Or couldn't these have been social media posts instead of actual headlined articles? Now there is some value to creating news stories for each development. It's easier to track the reporting. You don't have to keep changing headlines and adding updates, there is better accountability about the process, and arguably more transparency. But, it's this obsession with incrementalism that makes it an issue in the first place.
These two stories could have been one. Of course, this is just one current example. The worst example of this happens every election year. Every single move a candidate for office makes becomes a story. Except, of course, for the small candidates who probably don't matter. “Biden eats ice cream and talks jobs at Idaho town” ... “Trump swaps war stories with business leaders in Ohio” ... Do you really need that kind of incremental reporting? What purpose does it actually serve?
Now some of you may be wondering, “Come on, you're just being picky. What's actually wrong with incremental reporting?” Simply put: this type of headlining deepens our obsession with the 24/7 news cycle, it feeds our insatiable lust to always be in the know, and most importantly, or perhaps most dangerously, it feeds our instant gratification culture, which weakens our attention spans and prioritizes being first over being accurate.
Many of the problems I've discussed up to this point are symptoms of our insatiable 24-hour news cycle and need for instant gratification.
We need content to fill space and time. We need content that will turn heads because so many people are making content 24/7, we need to invoke fear just like that old adage, “if it bleeds, it leads.” We need to invoke fear because we need those clicks.
Don't stoke fear. Don't falsely give hope. Be accurate. Stick to the facts. Don't exaggerate. Don't try to predict the future with experts and don't feed the instant gratification machine.
But these days, incorrect headlines, at least those online, can be changed in a split second. Of course, any newer organization that's worth anything will make sure that you know that the headline was changed. They shouldn't just be changing headlines left and right and pretending like they've had it right all along.
Tactic 6: Musical Chairs Headlining
Unfortunately, this practice, which I guess we can call “musical chairs headlining,” is a huge problem, and this is the sixth tactic on the list. And actually since this will be the final tactic on the list, I'm just gonna jump in a bunch of other smaller complaints into this last one here.
Now this problem is really hard to track. I can't really give you any concrete examples because of the very nature of this reality. Headlines change and unless you're able to take a screenshot or use some advanced tech to look back on previous story versions, it's hard to say that it's happening.
But think to yourself, have you ever found a story one day and then went back to it later? And the story headline changed? Is there always a notification that the story used to be headlined differently?
Or, what about the Facebook headline, which is usually much more sensational than the headline that's on the actual story you see once you click on the link? These things happen and often go unnoticed and unchecked. This might seem like a small thing, but if we're experiencing these in small doses over and over again over years, the overall effect is huge. It's like a microaggression. On its own, it might seem innocuous at best, or slightly off-putting at worst. But a collection of them over the years? Well, that's enough to make most people question our integrity at best, or lose our trust at worst.
And we don't have trust to spare. So why change the headlines? Or, if you're going to, just be completely transparent about it. Better yet, just wait until you have all the facts. Changing headlines is also a symptom of the 24/7 news cycle. Let's just get it right.
So really quickly, here are a few more things that annoy me about headlines. What about when it's unclear that the piece you're reading is an opinion? Or – and this isn't really headline-related, it's style-related – what about when newspapers simply change the text justification to signal that it's an opinion? The New York Times does this. If they run an opinion piece on the front page, they don't tell you. They simply put a headshot there and change the justification to unjustified. That's essentially when the right edge of the text is jagged as opposed to the justified text which is uniformon the left and right side of the column.
But do people know that? How are regular people supposed to know that a change in text justification signals that the story’s an opinion? Can we get any more pretentious than that?
And speaking of unnecessary pretense, what about classist headlines? Those also drive me nuts, like this one, also from the Gray Lady: “Return of the Pied-a-Terre.” You've got to be kidding me. Really? For anyone who isn't steeped in rich folk lingo, a pied-a-terre is essentially an extra home. I mean, wow. Talk about a classist headline! And published in the middle of a pandemic! And home prices are skyrocketing and housing concerns are growing rapidly because so many people are facing evictions, now that the moratoriums are expired.
The Times could argue that its audience is generally upper middle-class, so they're writing to their audience. Bu what about their responsibility to minimize harm? A simple headline change could have done wonders here. Any headline with discriminatory overtones should be avoided. What's really the point of excluding people? To what benefit?
Look, I get it, the journalism marketplace has changed in ways we won't fully understand for years to come. Perhaps even decades... or dare I say scores.
The market’s shifting, money seems scarce. The race for eyeballs and clicks is very real. I understand all that and I truly empathize. I do. I've been there. I've lived that. I feel deeply for working journalists who write incredible stories only to have their headline twisted, or worse, they twist their own headline because of the pressures they constantly feel. It's OK to be flawed to make mistakes, but if we keep making mistakes without making honest efforts to improve, we're just making it harder on ourselves to do the job we all love doing.
But this is an important point to make. I want to thank our producer, Grace McGuire for pointing this out. It's not just on us journalists. You listening out there, a person who consumes news. We also need your help. Avoid the clickbait. Use your clicking powers for good. Choose the stories that you want to see more of. Ignore those that scream: “Click me” because they're saying exactly what you want to hear. For journalism culture to shift, the consumerism culture also needs to shift. Otherwise we'll be stuck with cat videos and listicles. Just like this one.
But seriously, people. Journalism is a public service, plain and simple. It shouldn't be a race to be first, a battle for clicks, a manipulation of fear or hope. It should simply be about providing a public service. Journalism should be about the pursuit of equitable justice and justice should be about the equitable distribution of fairness.
But that, my friends, is the subject of the next episode.
So there it is, creatures. That's episode 3 of Baffled with David DesRoches. Again, please reach out to me with stories you'd like for me to dissect. I cannot promise I'll have the answers, but I will definitely do my best to contextualize it for you.
You find me on Twitter @savingEJ or e-mail me at david.desroches@qu.edu. This podcast is a production of the Quinnipiac University Podcast Studio. Our producer is Grace McGuire. Please subscribe on the podcast app of your choice. To learn more about this podcast and the other ones we do here at Quinnipiac, you can visit qu.edu/podcast. Until next time.