Re: [Phys-l] journalism

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 01/23/2011 10:23 PM, Bernard Cleyet wrote:
> Another supposition:
>
> The "headline" is written by another.

That's quite likely.

> bc's long ago friend's only job at the LA times was to write the headlines.

Yes, it's standard practice to have a specialist write the headline
and the deck (the subheadline).

Here are some "TIPS FROM AN AWARD-WINNING FEATURES HEADLINE WRITER"
   http://www.gannett.com/go/newswatch/99/december/nw1217-3.htm

Tip #1 is:
   «Read the story. This sounds like, well, duh ... But from some 
   headlines you see, this doesn't seem always to occur to everyone. 
   Read through the whole thing before you try to write a headline. 
   If you don't understand what the story is about, you can't write 
   a good headline (and there just may be something wrong with the 
   story).»

In the case of the Yellowstone article, we are left to wonder about
the headline writer:
 -- Was he too lazy to read the article?
 -- Was he too clueless to understand that it contradicted his deck?
 -- Or was he too cynical, dishonest, and arrogant to care?

In journalism there is a saying: "if it bleeds, it leads".  All too 
often, this is taken to the extreme, as in this case:  A story that 
says things are *less* scary than they were a year ago is spun nearly
180 degrees so as to make it seem scary.

This is all the more shameful and corrosive because it is entirely
foreseeable that certain "news" networks and blogs will take from
the article only one or two sentences anyway.  So tacking one or 
two lurid sentences onto the front of an otherwise-reasonable article 
does not just degrade it by 1%;  once the echo-chamber gets ahold of 
it the degradation is 100%.

And where were the author and the editor in all this?  If somebody
stuck a false headline on an article I had written, I would ask him 
to fix it, and failing that I would go to the editor-in-chief and
get it fixed that way.  Once upon a time, a journalistic institution
was supposed to be stronger than its weakest link;  it was supposed
to have institutional standards ... and procedures for upholding
those standards.

================

I wrote:
> > from a "discussion" of the article:
> >
> >      «Some areas have risen 5-7 inches in the last two months... Fissures
> >      along river beds from the volcano may be venting gases and are seen
> >      as a possible cause of the massive increase in fish, animal and bird
> >      deaths on the Continental 48 states.»
> >
> >      http://forums.hannity.com/showthread.php?t=2176381

On 01/23/2011 02:43 PM, chuck britton replied:
> The "discussion" you found is certainly more 
> "meaty" than the inane comments that follow the 
> article itself.

You've got to be kidding.  Meaty?  The passage I quoted from that 
discussion is dragon meat with cockatrice gravy.  It's beyond bogus.  
It is wantonly anti-factual.

I did not read /all/ of the posts -- hundreds on that site alone, and
many many thousands elsewhere -- but I did do some sampling, and it
was not encouraging.

Are you saying we should choose the insane in preference to the inane?
I hope it doesn't come to that.