Thursday, December 16, 2010

Headlines Are Not News

I recently signed on to my online browser, and was greeted with a breaking top news headline that said, “Federal Judge Rules Health Care Law Unconstitutional.” Considering all the time and effort that went into creating and passing this bill, a decision to nullify it would seem a significant and noteworthy news event. So I chose to read on.

As it turns out, buried down in the heart of the story were three extremely important clarifications (corrections?) of that headline:

1. The federal judge who ruled on this case only deemed one portion of the bill unconstitutional – namely that portion that mandates that everyone buy health insurance as of 2014;

2. This Virginia-based federal judge ruled in one lawsuit brought solely by the Virginia Attorney General (an AG who has on repeated occasions shown questionable judgment in his ability to distinguish between his personal political agenda and his broader obligations as Virginia’s chief legal officer), so the result of the judge’s decision would only affect the citizens of Virginia;

3. Nationally, 12 other federal judges have already previously dismissed out-of-hand similar state-brought lawsuits as without merit; two other federal judges who did elect to hear such cases both ruled the law constitutional. So the more correct box score now reads: 14 individual judges have approved the law; one has not.

We all know that, in this highly politicized climate, the Obama health care law will ultimately wind up in the Supreme Court. That event is still years away, moving through all kinds of interim legal and political wrangles and the various court jurisdictions and levels. Once it arrives in the laps of Chief Justice Roberts & Company, it is anyone’s guess what will then happen. But that is for later. So in the broader context of “legal process,” yes, the Virginia decision was noteworthy, but nowhere near decisive – contrary to the impression created by that news headline.

Unfortunately, this more balanced, more complete perspective of the Virginia ruling got completely lost in most all news reporting of that day. The “unconstitutional” headline statement ran unchanged in most all other reporting media – both online as well as cable and network news programs, including the little “news ticker” that runs across the bottom of our TV screens.

News headline writing is a uniquely creative art form. Headlines are typically not written by the author of the in-depth article but by a separate person supposedly skilled in collapsing and highlighting an entire story into perhaps less than ½-dozen words, all without distorting the story itself. It is not an easy task. The author may in fact never even see the headline prior to publication, usually with no opportunity given to comment on or edit it. I am sympathetic to those who perform this challenging and necessary task. But I am more concerned about readers who come away from a headline with a wrong or significantly incomplete understanding of the underlying news. It is similar challenge that television guide editors face in seeking to describe an entire movie plot line in 3-4 words, often with laughable results – e.g. Gone With The Wind (“Woman saves her home”), or The Wizard of Oz (“Girl leaves Kansas”). But however difficult the challenge, the news headline – designed to both get our attention and to entice the reading of the full report – must be subject to the same standards of accuracy and objectivity as we expect from the story itself. In this instance, that standard was not met on what is acknowledged is a critical and emotional subject in America.

We are bombarded today by far more news, or opinion masquerading as news, or “news” that we should have no interest in, than we can possibly absorb. (How many Lindsay Lohan or Mel Gibson stories do we have to read before we can comfortably conclude that these are two significantly troubled people?) In our self-defense of this onslaught, more and more of us must scan the news in order to just stay marginally aware of what is happening around us. In times past, leisurely reading the morning and/or evening newspaper at the breakfast table or after dinner was part of our daily routine. Today we have very little time available to read full news reports from start to end, much less to then think and reflect on what we have read.

Nevertheless, the responsibility remains ours for staying properly informed, and basing our opinions on substantive and well-reasoned information. We need to pick our information sources wisely; differentiate between reporting, versus informed opinion, versus soapbox self-promoting demagoguery; and continually remind ourselves that when we “scan” the headlines, we only see a list of topics that we may need to follow up on. Good headline writing can help us with our task of being informed. There is input in a news headline, but there is clearly no knowledge therein. Gleaning knowledge, and from that wisdom, is still our job to do.

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