Journalists are traditionally taught to find an angle on a story. It’s hard to argue with that, considering that just reading a straight-up retelling of events is pretty dull. The angle is what gets us interested and makes us want to continue reading. Problems occur, however, when the journalist has to find an angle on a story that doesn’t really have one.
There are three main ways that Headline Contradicted by Actual Article examples see print. The first culprit is that no one catches the contradiction between the article and the headline. Good journalists stay pretty busy; sometimes they just miss things. It happens.
The second, somewhat less likely source is a journalist’s doing an interview, mishearing something, and then writing the article. Journalists get all worked up because they think they are hearing fairly groundbreaking new but later find out that the main thrust of the article isn’t true at all. Still, they have a deadline to meet. So they bury the real conclusion several paragraphs down, leave for the day, and hit the local watering hole.
The third cause of Headline Contradicted by Actual Article is that many of these articles are written with the journalist’s full knowledge that the headline is misleading, but they use the real conclusion as the “twist” to get your attention toward the end. Many scientific studies, for example, are victims of overexaggeration by zealous writers to punch up their stories.
Headline contradicted by actual article [fragment]
uit: It’s not news, it’s Fark : how mass media tries to pass off crap as news - Drew Curtis
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