Last night I climbed into bed knowing exactly what I would write about in the morning, but alas, I awoke to find that the Seattle Times had snatched my precious snark right out from under my pillow. Sorta.
The headline on the front page of the Times last night was stark and scary: “Seattle sees sharp increase in crime.” Oh no! Good thing we’ve kicked out that incompetent Mayor Nickels and his soft-on-crime staff.
But the lede of the article the headline linked to seemed to hail from a different story:
Even though Seattle saw increases in both violent crimes and property crimes during the first half of 2009 compared to the same period in 2008, the slight rise came after back-to-back years that saw crime dip to lows not seen since the 1960s.
Wait… the headline said “sharp increase,” but the lede says “slight rise”… and from record lows. And while the lede says that “violent crimes” rose during the first half of 2009, the article goes on to point out that the worst of these crimes—murders and rapes—both decreased from the same period a year ago.
Ahh… this is the sort of irresponsible hyperbole for which I live to abuse the Times. Unfortunately, as I slept, the editors repented and changed the headline to the less provocative and much more accurate: “Seattle sees increase in crime after two record-low years.”
Oh. I guess Mayor Nickels didn’t do such a bad job after all.
The point is, as I’ve argued before, headlines matter, and can do more to influence public perception than the articles themselves. Because quite honestly, more people will read the headline than the actual article.
And now, with only one major Seattle newspaper left in publication, the Times’ headline writers have more influence than ever before… and thus more responsibility than ever before to get it right.
Headlines DO matter, but most of the “blog-o-sphere” just repeats (and misquotes) headlines and rarely deals with the details. This is true of the endless climate “debate” or innumerable other issues. A vague poorly worded headline is used as some “proof” while the actual details and LONG list of caveats, exceptions and details are missed.
So we don’t have a booming violent crime wave as the headline sounded? Huh. We have a ‘slight rise’ in the first half of last year off from RECORD lows. I can see the Times or other junk papers saying when interest rates rise from 1% to 1.5% that “MASSIVE UNPRECEDENTED 50% INCREASE IN INTEREST RATES COMING FROM FED!”. LOL
Goldy–
You got a bad case of “rabbit ears”…..and worrying about small stuff.
Thank God for HA though…at least you corrected the record with your perception to your tens of readers!
And yet you waste an extraordinarily large part of your day writing gibberish here, fanboy.
The headline now says: “Sharp increase in Seattle robberies, assaults; murders, rapes down.”
oh, you mean like when they put on the front page a 40 year old claim of molestation by a priest with no evidence, but put on page 14 about rabbis selling body parts? like that?
and by the way, whatever happened to those rabbis, since the media did such a great job of not covering it?
Goldy–
Here is a link to the Times Article on Cfrime from June 2nd. Does this headline meet your approval??
http://seattletimes.nwsource.c.....ts02m.html
Also, let me see if I get this straight..
It’s ok for Leftists to take credit when Crime Stats improve….but it’s the headlines fault for when they go up??
Tell the victims & victim family’s that you are worried about the headlines Goldy!
Has anyone looked around at the business community, the financial industry, the Blethens, the newspapers, and so on, and wondered if we don’t really need better capitalists? The guys we have don’t seem like they can run much of anything anywhere but into the ground.
DL @7, think of legacy capitalism as the natural result of a shrinking, inbreeding gene pool. Wait…do I hear a banjo in the distance?
@7 “Successful capitalist” nowadays means a senior executive of a corporation who gave the best sob story or got his nose far enough up Geithner’s ass to get a prime spot sucking at the government teat.
Don’t believe me? Watch what happens when…OK, I shouldn’t be too negative, if the final tally from the Christmas shopping season looks like a bloodbath of red ink. We’ll see if Macy’s and Bloomingdales suddenly become “too big to fail”.
[Deleted — see HA Comment Policy]
Kinda-sorta interesting that the Times did this on the heels of two high-profile (and indeed tragic) incidents of police officers getting gunned down by a couple of whack jobs. Nothing like that to have a large part of the public already thinking that we’ve got to be awash in an epidemic of violent crime. Seems rather like what the Republican propaganda-meisters are good at: pouring salt in the wounds of people’s subjective fears.
Yes, headlines matter. How about this?
“WSDOT’s Viaduct Whopper”
Publicola
http://publicola.net/?p=21378
vs
“Seattle Times Investigation Reveals That Christine Gregoire Really Wants That Tunnel”
SeattleWeekly
http://blogs.seattleweekly.com.....out_it.php
The PI got the headline right.
@11
Three actually. Two cops were shot in Eatonville last night.
I’ve noticed that AOL manages to use questionable headlines to get it’s messages across.
It takes a questionable survey and posts the headline in it’s rotating news stories, linked to a story so brief that it doesn’t possibly convey a fraction of the detail needed. Then there is a link in the story, which sometimes just goes to a newspaper article which is only slightly longer than the AOL re-cap, which only then links to something which tells enough detail to raise a few red flags about the headline.
AOL has become the National Inquirer of the ISP providers. Of course, it’s status as an ISP provider is shrinking so rapidly it may not last much past this year, Time-Warner has already discarded it with the trash.
Congressman: But that was just the headline!
LBJ: I only read the headlines. That’s all the people read.
Congressman: But I issued a retraction!
LBJ: Remind me of that when you want a new dam in your district.
Note to Harry Reid: This is how things were handled by a Democrat with a spine.
@16
Perfect!