INDICTMENT – My Blog

How the Headline Ate the Article and Called It Dinner

There was a time, dimly remembered if at all, when a headline was a summary. It told you what the article contained so you could decide whether to read it. Then someone discovered that a headline could also be a weapon. Specifically, a weapon aimed at the part of your brain that feels an emotion before it can name it. The headline stopped summarizing. It started provoking. The article; once the point of the enterprise; became an afterthought, a CYA paragraph buried beneath the fold that technically contained the facts the headline had stretched past recognition. You shared the headline. You felt something because of the headline. You did not read the article. The headline did not need you to.

The Neutrality Myth: Spinelessness Is Not the Same as Integrity

Somewhere along the line, the profession confused having no position with having a principled position. The result is a kind of journalism that treats every claim as equally weighty regardless of its relationship to evidence, not because the journalist believes this, but because taking a side might alienate a demographic that the advertising department has identified as valuable. This is not neutrality. Neutrality would require weighing the claims and reporting which one the evidence supports. What we have instead is a performance of neutrality; a costume worn to avoid having to make a judgment that might cost money. The spine is not missing. It has been surgically removed and billed to the marketing budget.