Politics and Democracy: Tips from Our Newsletter

October 28, 2021

Sigh. Considering the exceptional political polarization of U.S. society and the slate of broadly popular legislation that has hit the cutting room floor in recent years, perhaps we can all agree something is up with U.S. democracy. But, to put that at the feet of the Democratic party alone, as this Rolling Stone headline above does, despite acknowledging in its opening ‘graph that Republicans are seeking to curtail voting rights and overturn fair elections (those critical pillars of said democracy), is disingenuous and inaccurate. Sure, headlines aren’t the best place for nuanced political commentary, but in this case the answer for reframing this headline is found in a meme: Why not both?

 

December 16, 2021

In December 2021 a U.S. House select committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021 revealed a number of text messages sent to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows by lawmakers and journalists. Some of the texts are from panicked people stationed within the Capitol while the deadly riot unfolded urging the then-president’s team to end the violence. Others, including one from Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, are from Trump allies suggesting ways he might illegally seize power. Of course, a U.S. lawmaker seeking to keep a president in power against the will of the people is extremely newsworthy and demands public attention.

Vague headlines like the one above, from CNN, however, don’t help audiences jump into this complex story. By leaving out details (who is Jordan again? what texts are we talking about? what did it say?) this headline makes big assumptions about its audience’s knowledge of a story that unfolded over many days during the busiest time of year. It would be perfectly understandable for many Americans to have missed this story completely. And without key details, this headline displays no sense of urgency to the public. Contrast it with the one below, from CNBC; crucial contextual elements help audiences get up to speed on this important story before they even get to the article.

 

January 20, 2022

In late January 2022, the U.S. Senate failed to advance legislation to expand voting access and a change to Senate rules that would allow the legislation to pass failed by a 52-48 margin. All of the Republicans in the Senate, as well as two Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, made this happen. As with any big news event, it’s critical that reporting on this centers both those responsible for the action in question and who those actions will impact.

The headline above, from CNN, focuses the story on Democrats’ “defeat.” This plays into the politics-as-spectator-sport framing of legislation that erases the very real people who are impacted by the actions of Congress as if it’s all just a game. (Were Democrats defeated, or were voting rights for the entire country defeated?) It also obscures the Republican party’s prominent role in the outcome of last night’s debate by assigning no actor to the failed vote.

By contrast, the above headline from CNBC, properly positions the actor and the act: Republicans blocked the voting rights bills alongside Sinema and Manchin. While it’s certainly relevant that two Democrats also blocked these bills, the emphasis should be on Senate Republicans. The press often takes for granted that all legislation should split along party lines and thus focuses on outliers who cross the aisle. In reality, any of the 50 Senate Republicans could have chosen to alter Senate rules to expand voting rights and chose not to, and in news coverage those 50 should receive as much responsibility for this outcome as Sinema and Manchin.

 

February 3, 2022

The New York Times reported that, after the 2020 election, Donald Trump asked his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, “to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states.” That, apparently, was after asking the Attorney General if the Justice Department could do it.

So it sounds like the former president had quite a specific, prominent role in the attempt to seize voting machines: asking those on his team to do something completely unprecedented in U.S. democracy. It’s curious that the Times would describe it so vaguely in their headline, above. We always prefer precision here, making the Guardian’s reporting on the Times’ discovery, below, a better option.

 

March 24, 2022

A hearing for a U.S. Supreme Court nominee — which literally has two partisan sides and entails a lot of one-on-one conversation — can quite easily be framed by headlines as a head-to-head battle. That makes any bias pretty clear when comparing different framings side by side. That the hearing in question below was of Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is the first Black woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice, makes it even more important to get right.

The headline above, from The Hill, describes Sen. Ted Cruz’s part in the hearing. The word “presses” connotes seeking hidden information, like an interrogator might, implying Jackson has something to hide. Emphasizing “critical race theory” (without quotes) implies it was a legitimate thing for Cruz to be asking about — with CRT being a legal framework to begin with that might have been the case if not for the bastardization of the phrase we’ve described elsewhere. And finally calling the whole endeavor “tense,” a vague assessment of the environs, puts culpability for that tension on both Cruz’s and Jackson’s shoulders.

In reality, any tension or agitation during the hearings was the fault of the GOP who, by many accounts, raised the temperature in the room while Jackson remained calm and patient. The Guardian headline above frames those events in a much more straight-forward and honest way. This construction places Jackson squarely as the recipient of the “attacks” perpetuated by Senate Republicans without equivocating.

 

March 31, 2022

What makes a good headline? Context, context, context.

The above headline, from the Washington Post, is accurate. But why does it matter that the call logs are missing? The average person reading this may not realize (or it might just not come to mind) that White House call logs are supposed to be complete and turned over to the National Archives for the public’s knowledge of what our president is doing and to whom they speak. Some audience members aren’t old enough to remember the scandal that 18 minutes of missing audio recordings caused for President Nixon, an incident folks like Bob Woodward were quick to note in comparison. The significance may seem obvious to reporters and political obsessives, but our job as journalists is not to assume knowledge on behalf of our audiences.

The headline below, from the New York Times, is better because it quickly provides context and meaning. The gap in call logs — what we don’t know — matters because of what we do know: that on January 6, 2021 Trump was seeking help from Republican lawmakers to overturn the rightful election results while his supporters overtook the Capitol. Thus, a gap this large is rightfully concerning to those investigating any wrongdoing on behalf of the Trump administration. Connecting the dots this easily in a headline does a great service to busy audiences.

 

April 21, 2022

The headlines below refer to the bill signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in March 2022 which, as the Washington Post reports,:

“…[bans] instruction or classroom discussion of ‘sexual orientation or gender identity’ for kindergartners through third graders in public schools. It also empowers parents to sue school districts over teachings they don’t like, and requires schools to tell parents when their child receives mental health services.”

After the bill passed, the Walt Disney Co. released a statement condemning the bill and asking for it to be repealed. Both of the headlines below frame these events very differently.

The headline above, from a Los Angeles Times story syndicated by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, combines two harmful tropes of political coverage. First, it uses the word “feud” to describe a very uneven conflict. As MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan and NYU’s Jay Rosen have discussed on Twitter, calling this a “feud” creates a false equivalence between Disney and DeSantis’ actions. DeSantis and his party have led a bad-faith campaign accusing the company of being “groomers” who support child abuse and made moves to remove the company’s self-governing status in the state. Disney, on the other hand, put out a late, three-sentence statement. These actions are not proportional.

Second, the use of the term “culture war” to vaguely refer to the long fight for equal rights for the LGBTQ community is delegitimizing. As we’ve written above, “Lumping debates over whose life is worthy and free into the term ‘culture wars’ dilutes the serious and often deadly consequences of whose ‘values’ are enshrined into law.”

The headline above, from Vanity Fair, gets it right. It calls DeSantis’s actions “threatening” and refers to Disney’s actions as “spoke out.” These terms accurately describe those actions without implying they are of equal weight. The headline also refers to the bill as “Anti-LGBTQ,” putting the true goal of the bill in harsh relief rather than referring it to as a “culture war.”

 

July 14, 2022

During the July 2022 House select committee public hearings on the events of January 6, 2021, important details about a December 2021 meeting held at the White House were revealed. Ten Republican members of Congress and then-Representative-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene met to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

I’ll give the headline above from Axios credit for citing the primary source of this information (White House visitor logs). But it leaves out the most important part of this news: What were the Republicans pressuring Pence to do?

The headline below, from Insider, may be way longer than most newsrooms would allow, but it does cover all the critical details: what the meeting was about and that the president was there. It also adds that crucial fact that six of those in attendance later asked for pardons, implying that they feared what they were doing put them at risk of prosecution. The bottom line: who attended a meeting is important to audiences but only if they know what the meeting was about.

 

August 11, 2022

The Washington Post published the headline below atop its story on the political implications of the FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. It was immediately and harshly judged by media scholars on Twitter for doing the politicizing it accuses of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The implication of this headline structure is that, if vowing to depoliticize “Justice” came before this search, then the search marks the politicization of it. That suggests that the FBI’s search was not driven by a compelling legal reason, like evidence of a crime, but instead by retaliation against a political rival.

We know little about the search so far. But, considering the measured history of Garland’s approach, the fact that a federal judge signed off on the warrant, and the unprecedented nature of the search, it is likely safe to say the argument for it was compelling.

Regardless of the facts, however, supporters of Trump (including much of the GOP) will likely declare this a “witch hunt” driven by electoral politics. (In fact, violent rhetoric has already begun to spread on the right.) This is the “political firestorm” the second version of this WaPo headline below, updated later the same day, refers to.

This updated version accurately describes the heat Garland will face due to the right’s determination that the search is politically driven — instead of implying he is in fact politicizing his role.

 

August 25, 2022

I typically avoid using examples from Fox News in this space. That’s largely because I agree with media scholar Dan Froomkin that what the channel produces is not accurately described as news but is instead propaganda. It’s also because the juxtaposition such an example would create is often laughably transparent in its partisanship. Today I feel the comparison is worth making.

In August the Biden administration announced its long-awaited student debt plan. The Fox headline above makes no attempt to hide its opinion on the facts of the news. It refers to student loan forgiveness as a “handout,” a term long used to pejoratively describe public assistance. It also chooses to place the announcement against the backdrop of “as national debt soars. ” (This explainer from Quartz shows why the national debt is used as a scare tactic to avoid public spending, if you’re curious.) Fox could have easily chosen to end the headline with “as student debt soars” but that would paint the announcement in a positive light, which is not the goal here.

In contrast, the Washington Post’s headline tells it straight: what’s happening (loan cancellations) how it’s happening (who gets what money) and who’s doing it (Biden). No naked partisan slant to be found.

 

November 17, 2022

On Tuesday, former U.S. president Donald Trump announced he would run for president again in 2024. In the headline above, NPR chose to contextualize this news within the recent midterm election results. But is the challenge Trump may or may not face in becoming the GOP’s nominee the most important part of his potential candidacy?

The Washington Post (above) and NBC News (below) certainly didn’t think so. They both, in slightly different ways, told audiences what was most important about Trump: he tried to overturn the 2020 election in his own favor. Of all the things a newsroom could choose to include about Trump in a headline, this piece is significant. By emphasizing his attempt at insurrection, these headlines implicitly make an argument that his candidacy is at the very least unusual, if not dangerous for democracy.

Oddly enough, though the NPR headline soft-pedals the announcement, a tweet of this story from the newsroom went even further than the examples above. Regardless, it’s refreshing to see newsrooms refusing to normalize Trump’s attempts at subverting the will of the people and keeping it top of mind for readers. For more examples of how different newsrooms handled this aspect of Trump’s announcement, check out Media Matters’ analysis.

 

December 22, 2022

A report from the U.S. House ways and means committee revealed in December that the IRS did not audit President Trump’s taxes during his first two years in office. The IRS has a mandate to audit the president’s taxes each year.

I see two problems with how the headline above, from the Guardian, frames this news. First, the passive use of “failed” denotes something going wrong, as when a machine misfires or someone is unsuccessful at a task. However, reports make it appear that the IRS didn’t try to audit Trump and fail. Rather, they didn’t take up the task until they were asked for the audits by the ways and means committee in 2017. “Failed” implies some attempt at success. The news here is that, for whatever reason, the IRS didn’t attempt their mandatory task until prompted.

The second problem I see is the inclusion of the word “timely,” which makes it appear as though the core issue here is the IRS’s time management. Again, the key takeaway from this story is that people at the IRS chose not to conduct their mandatory work. The speed at which they eventually did the auditing is less important than the fact that they didn’t do it until prompted despite a requirement. These two small words, “failed” and “timely,” effectively soften the impact of the news of this wrongdoing.

The headline from MSNBC, above, on the other hand uses active verbs like “ignored” and “delayed.” These words emphasize that the lack of an audit was the result of choices made by the IRS, underlining their agency in these events. I love to see action words that attribute credit where credit is due.

 

January 19, 2023

President Biden’s lawyers recently found and subsequently turned over classified documents found in two unapproved places. The mishandling of classified documents, of course, rings a few bells considering former president Trump’s recent refusal to hand over government documents after his presidency.

The headline below, from NPR, is a perfect example of false equivalence by omission. Yes, special counsel have been assigned to investigate both Biden’s and Trump’s handling of these documents, that’s true. But that action is in response to similar incidents that are of very unequal magnitude. Emphasizing this framing, that “Biden joins Trump” in this experience, is painting both with the same brush.

The headline from U.S. News below, on the other hand, gets straight to the point. While there are similarities between what can both be called “document dramas,” there are also “dramatic differences.”

The handling and mishandling of government documents by presidents and vice presidents is obviously newsworthy. But it’s just as obvious that these particular cases are very different and should not be falsely equated just because these two sit on opposite sides of the aisle. That would be egregious “bothsidesism.”

For a good read on this, check out a recent Q&A with media critic Margaret Sullivan.

 

February 2, 2023

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a legislative plan Tuesday that, if taken up wholesale, will have a huge impact on the state’s higher education system. DeSantis, who is expected to run for president in 2024, wants to ban state colleges from hosting programs on diversity, equity and inclusion, and critical race theory. (Reminder: CRT has gone from a term describing a legal theory not actually taught in U.S. grade schools to a euphemism for American history that acknowledges racism and slavery.)

This sounds very much like the desire for a memory hole where the country’s long history of racism and white supremacy is “disappeared” for the benefit of the white and powerful. The rewriting of history for political gain, banning education that would weaken white supremacy, suppression of the opposition … add to this Florida’s new censorship of school libraries and state “retraining” on book collection and it’s hard not to describe this series of moves as neo-fascist. That ideology, of course, relies heavily on tightly maintaining the education of its people in a way that serves its leaders. That education usually promotes a revisionist nationalism, often calling back to idealized “better” times and/or traditions.

The following statements came from DeSantis’s office Tuesday:

“… the legislation will ensure Florida’s public universities and colleges are grounded in the history and philosophy of Western Civilization ….”

“In Florida, we will build off of our higher education reforms by aligning core curriculum to the values of liberty and the Western tradition ….”

And yet, headlines from major outlets announcing this news barely batted an eyelash. Some, like the New York Times headline below, felt the crux of the story is actually its impact on DeSantis’s political clout.

Not only does this wording dismiss very impactful policy as a savvy political move, but it sets up and normalizes conflict between DeSantis and the public education system. Calling it the “education establishment” — as if state government and public education don’t necessarily work in tandem — legitimizes this “culture war” and aligns itself with a populist ideology that rails against said “establishment.” The DeSantis office was probably high-fiving over this headline today.

Similarly, the headlines below support DeSantis’ point of view more than an “objective” journalist would expect. The first is a National Review headline run by Yahoo! which highlights the elimination of “bureaucracies,” language used by DeSantis and a common dog-whistle from the right as it denotes ineffective government spending. This headline fully buys into the premise that DEI initiatives are wastes of money.

The second, below, is from the Tampa Bay Times; a similar wording ran in Orlando’s Spectrum News 13. Both use “indoctrination” in quotes to imply the word came from DeSantis, not necessarily the newsroom. But since nothing about either headline seeks to interrogate the existence of actual indoctrination, we’re left to assume that it does actually exist. Unless, of course, the writers were attempting a bit of irony-via-scare-quotes. It wouldn’t be the first time, but it’s a cheap way of attempting to telegraph the truth without being married to it.

What would have been an appropriate headline to announce DeSantis’s intervention into higher education? The Associated Press, below, simply tells it like it is.

 

February 9, 2023

In 2020, Twitter temporarily blocked the spread of an unverified New York Post story on Hunter Biden. Three former executives from the social media giant appeared before the House Oversight Committee Wednesday to discuss this and other decisions. Republicans consider this event “censorship,” but that’s far from a settled matter — if it was, the Washington Post wouldn’t have included the quotation marks in the live blog headline above. As we discussed in last week’s newsletter, in headlines, the use of scare quotes around a word whose accuracy is up for debate does not actually imply uncertainty to audiences. (I will die on this hill.) In this case, with no attribution, it’s unclear who is calling this censorship at all.

Furthermore, I’d also argue the word “grilled,” meaning an intense interrogation, implies that the subject warrants such questioning. This is also up for debate, making “grilled” a more sensational verb than necessary.

The Guardian went with the plain “to testify” instead, without making a judgement on whether the “handling” their headline describes below was censorship or not. In juxtaposition I think these headlines make a good case for accurate prose, even if it’s less spicy.

 

March 9, 2023

Former president Donald Trump took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference over the weekend. In his speech, he said:

“In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

This is startling language from someone running for president, let alone someone who may face criminal charges for his role in an attack on the Capitol. But many headlines covering the long, falsehood-filled speech — like the Washington Post’s, below — skipped over Trump’s authoritarian messaging. Instead, many focused on Trump’s relation to the GOP, implying the important takeaway was his electability, not his vision for America.

As the Post’s own columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote about the reports, “Coverage can be so bland and innocuous as to mislead. The audience — that is, potential voters — might easily come away from such coverage believing that Trump acted like a normal candidate, not a figure plainly unfit to handle any public position.”

What’s interesting in the Post’s case is that a piece by a different reporter under an “Analysis” banner did a much better job with its headline, below. It highlights the abnormality of Trump’s worrying rhetoric and also connects it to its origins on the right.

The juxtaposition between the tone of this “analysis” and that of the “straight” reporting exemplifies an issue we see across political journalism. In many arenas, connecting the dots of context and history for our audiences is a welcomed and necessary part of everyday reporting. But in politics, one risks the perception of “bias” when you put two and two together without applying an “analysis” or “opinion” label.

 

April 6, 2023

The above headline from MSNBC leads a video discussing remarks Trump made after his arraignment Tuesday which disparaged the judge overseeing his case and his family. This headline certainly is accurate, but it’s missing some key information: why should anyone care?

Of course, many news organizations treat anything Trump does as newsworthy, but he and his sons post online all the time. What makes this instance “special,” so to speak?

The Syracuse.com headline, below, gets to the point. What Trump posted online wasn’t exactly positive. And these targeted posts came right after his arraignment, during which Trump was warned against making incendiary social media posts. As always, the key to a good, useful headline is context, context, context!

 

April 27, 2023

On Wednesday, Disney filed a lawsuit against Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Washington Post reports that Disney, “accuses DeSantis of orchestrating a campaign to punish Disney over its political views. The lawsuit comes just one week after DeSantis pledged to work with the state legislature to roll back Disney’s corporate control over its Florida theme park.” To accompany this news, the New York Times published a look at how popular corporations like Disney have weathered such attacks with the headline below.

As discussed previously in this newsletter, framing this debacle as a fair fight between Disney and an elected official is simply inaccurate. The origin of this saga is a statement Disney released in opposition to Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill, which DeSantis signed last year. This led to a series of bad-faith attacks on the company accusing them of “grooming” minors and threats of retaliation from DeSantis. Thus the Times’ “Man vs. Mouse” framing unfairly equates the two parties’ actions. It also calls what DeSantis is doing “taking on” the company. That phrase does some light editorializing by implying that Disney did something wrong that needs to be corrected.

The headline below, from the Washington Post, is a much more even-handed approach. It simply notes the suit and the accusation at its core without equating both sides.

 

May 18, 2023

The Biden administration and U.S. Congress are currently negotiating over a bill to raise the country’s debt ceiling, which would allow the government to pay its bills and stop it from running out of money. Now, I’m no expert on the debt ceiling, so I’ll let recent reports sum up the potential impacts:

From the Washington Post: Breaching the debt ceiling “could cause the government to default, unleashing economic havoc that could plunge the country into another recession.”

What would that havoc look like? From NPR: “The people who are hit first and foremost by this is anybody who is receiving some type of payment from the federal government… So you’re talking seniors or people with disabilities who get Social Security payments, military personnel and veterans benefits, federal employees, people who are getting support from programs funded by federal money like SNAP for food stamps, housing assistance. And then that has a big ripple effect on the economy from there.”

The debt ceiling is regularly lifted with little to no fuss in order to keep this from happening. So, what (or who) is stopping it this time? Well, the GOP is refusing to pass a bill to do so unless it features new policies that it wants passed but that Democrats oppose.

As New York Magazine puts it, “The difference between an ordinary negotiation over the contours of a debt-ceiling increase and extortion is that the latter includes demands and threats. The demands are not proposals to combine policy one side prefers with policy the other side wants (i.e., we’ll fund my food stamp program in return for funding your farm subsidy program). A demand is an insistence on obtaining unreciprocated policy gains that the counterparty would otherwise oppose.

The threats are the mechanism for obtaining the demands: Specifically, the threat is to refuse to lift the debt ceiling unless concessions are given in return.”

Let’s see how a few headlines frame the issue.

The headlines above, respectively, treat the negotiation as a fair fight (The Hill), describe GOP-driven policies as an autonomous “what” that is holding up the deal of its own accord (Forbes) and describe one of these policies-as-ransom without denoting who is making it an obstacle (NBC News). None of these adequately describe the power play at hand and the agency of GOP leaders.

Why might that be? Well, as journalism professor and critic Jay Rosen writes, “There is a conflict in their code. Journalists are supposed to be world class crap detectors. But also good realists. When world class crap — using the debt limit as leverage — becomes GOP policy, the realism requirement tilts to, ‘You may not like it, but it’s smart politics.’”

The headlines below, however, do a better job by putting Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy in the driver’s seat and calling this “GOP debt ceiling crises” (MSNBC) and by referring to GOP ‘“demands” (HuffPost).

 

June 15, 2023

In June, Donald Trump became the first U.S. president ever charged with a federal crime. There are so many angles of this story to cover and it was difficult to choose just one. So, instead, I’ll deviate from our usual bad vs. good format and discuss a few examples from across the spectrum.

We’ll start with my least favorite, from Bloomberg, below. Is it newsworthy that Trump’s base is going strong after he was indicted again? Sure. But it is newsworthy because of what his reelection would mean for the U.S. and the impact it would have on its residents. The horse-race stats about polling and fundraising are merely the proof of this news, not the most important part. As I’ll keep repeating before the 2024 elections and as Jay Rosen says, “It’s not the odds, but the stakes.”

Another not-great headline, from NewsNation, below, is a tried-and-true format: attribution + colon + quote. In many cases, this is a useful format for quickly communicating news. But when the quote in question is a falsehood, it only serves to amplify and legitimize the lie by giving it prominent, context-free space. Quotes like this should always be both prefaced and followed by the truth.

Now for the positives: the headline below from the Associated Press does what, in my opinion, not enough headlines about Trump’s plea did: named the charges! With all of the charges and lawsuits Trump is involved in (see the headline that follows, from the Independent, for a good example) and the way audiences experience news avoidance, we cannot assume that everyone is keeping up. Providing just a little bit more context goes a long way.

Finally, we love a headline that speaks to the service journalism within. What matters to audiences about Trump’s indictment (besides its place in history) is what happens next. The story from FiveThirtyEight below gets to it.

 

September 7, 2023

Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville has spent months holding up military promotions based on his personal feelings about a Pentagon policy that helps military personnel obtain abortions. If you’ve been a subscriber to this newsletter for a little while, you may already know what I’m going to say about the headline from CNN below.

A “feud” is a prolonged dispute that implies agency on both sides. The way Tuberville has single-handedly been blocking hundreds of U.S. military nominees is not a feud — it’s more like a hostage situation. Even though CNN writes, “The escalating feud between Democrats and Sen. Tommy Tuberville…” both Democrats and Republicans (not to mention seven former secretaries of defense) oppose Tuberville’s moves.

I appreciate how the The Associated Press headline below points out that “a single senator” is able to have so much power in this situation. However, it’s missing some important points.

What I’m looking for in an ideal headline about this ordeal is:

• Mention of halting of military promotions
• Assignment of responsibility solely to Tuberville
• Mention of his justification for doing so

The New York Times does it better. We get an assignment of responsibility to Tuberville, a quick nod to the military promotions, and a succinct “over abortion policy.” It checks all the boxes, in my opinion.

 

October 12, 2023

When a long-term developing story breaks out, major news outlets will sometimes launch a page on their website that aggregates all of their articles on the topic. The name of that page is often found at the top of these stories, above the headline, in a spot some call the “eyebrow.” (News jargon is weird, I know.)

While reading this week, I noticed the “eyebrow” on the Washington Post’s page for news about Israel and Hamas read as follows:

Most frequently, I have seen this phrased as “Israel-Hamas War,” as with The New York Times’ own topic page, below.

Now, in the wake of devastating violence, I can understand why someone might read this section and think, “Who cares? Why does this matter?”

For starters, this is about accuracy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu specifically named Hamas in his public statement declaring Israel was at war.

But this also matters because the hyphen linking the two entities in either headline signals that each is a “side” of the war in question, and thus implicitly assigns blame for horrific acts of terror. The difference between these two phrases is the difference between separating the acts of Hamas from Gazans and lumping them together.

“Israel-Hamas War” acknowledges the nuance that, though Hamas controls Gaza, it is a polarizing force that does not necessarily represent Gazans; there have not been legislative elections in Gaza since 2006. “Israel-Gaza War” on the other hand might imply that these two entities are on equal footing and the civilians of Gaza are party to the assault they now face. And to be clear, the density of Gaza means attacks on it have and will likely continue to lead to civilian casualties.

Sure, news media necessitates shorthand and we often describe wars past and present by the land represented, not their governments. Considering that long, complicated history and the condition of Gaza, I’d argue this situation requires far more sensitivity. I’d also go as far as to argue that any non-representative government that commits an act of war should be named separately from its people in coverage of the violence that follows. Good journalism requires context, especially when it comes to histories of power.

 

October 26, 2023

U.S. Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana was elected Speaker of the House Wednesday. He doesn’t have the same national name recognition as some of the previous speakers or recent candidates, so media outlets were quick to publish explainers. The headline above tops one from The Hill which lists Johnson’s recent moves.

These types of headlines typically score well in search engine optimization because a curious searcher might type such a phrase into Google verbatim. They’re meant to make you click, so they don’t answer the question at hand in any way.

The headline below from NBC News, on the other hand, makes an effort to actually answer the question with the most pertinent piece of Johnson’s political experience front and center for audiences impacted by this news. The person now second in line for the presidency tried to overturn the 2020 election to insert Trump as president and has been called the “most important architect of the Electoral College objections.” This is incredibly important for voters to understand — whether they have time to click through a headline or not.

 

November 9, 2023

Framing is a somewhat nebulous concept, but it’s a critical one to understand as a  media maker or consumer, particularly during times of high conflict. That’s because it isn’t just about the facts, but about how the facts are presented.

I like scholar David Tewksbury’s definition of framing best: “the verbal and visual information in an article that directly or implicitly suggests what the problem is about, how it can be addressed, and who is responsible for creating and solving it.”

A key part of this definition is the “information in an article.” What is included and what is excluded from a story are often of equal import.

For example: the headline above, from the Guardian, is pretty straightforward on its face; it is a brief summary of the U.S. Secretary of State’s recent statements. But when contrasted with the headline below, from the Washington Post, it’s clear the Guardian’s writer made a distinct choice in what to leave out of this frame.

The Guardian’s choice to exclude that Blinken said Gaza should be run by Palestinians could be simply due to space constraints and prioritizing Blinken’s full name, and of course the full article does express this context. But we all know no one can read every article they see in a day, so headlines remain vital, precious real estate for telling stories. Israel is a key ally of the U.S., so Blinken’s full perspective on how this conflict should end is pertinent information.

The Post’s headline writer made their own interesting choice as well by leaving out the word “Israel.” Perhaps the audience is meant to assume that the “re” in “reoccupied” implies that Israel would be the occupier again. However, I believe it’s still worth noting since there’s a big difference between post-conflict sovereignty for Palestinians and occupation by another non-Israel state.

Both headlines exhibit how subtle choices of what information is included in limited space can alter the salience of a news event.

 

November 16, 2023

Would you believe me if I told you the two headlines above, the first from the New York Times and the second from USA Today, were about the same speech?

Well, it’s the truth. The full quote from Trump’s speech was:

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”

“Root out” in this context is damning enough; it’s Trump wanting to round up people he doesn’t like, which is dangerous rhetoric for any public figure to spout, let alone a presidential candidate. (I could also write an essay on the Times summarizing “communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left” as “the Left” but I digress.) However, there’s a reason USA Today and other outlets below highlighted the word “vermin.”

The dehumanization of political enemies and marginalized groups by calling them vermin, rodents, animals, and other objects of extermination is a well-worn authoritarian tactic. The goal of such rhetoric is to prime an audience to believe a group is less than human, to devalue their lives, so that violence and atrocities committed against them are accepted and normalized.

This is a point I wish all coverage of this event made more strongly: the key takeaway here is not that this speech is simply reminiscent of violent dictatorships, but that this type of speech has been a tool in forming those dictatorships.

I’m glad USA Today referenced that Hitler and Mussolini used similar language. I don’t love, however, the phrase “draws more comparisons” in this headline because it attributes this comparison to anonymous others, instead of the newsroom or journalist connecting the dots for us (as is their duty in a high-information, low-trust environment). The Washington Post’s version, below, uses “echoing dictators” instead. This declarative phrasing doesn’t shuck attribution to a third party but lets it stand as a statement of fact. (See the Quote of the Week below for more on this topic.)

My nominee for best headline about this speech, however, is Vanity Fair’s, below. It pulls no punches by summarizing not only Trump’s word choices but also his pledged plans for a second term. Most importantly, it adds the context we all need by naming this plan a wish to “Go Full Authoritarian.”

Traditional journalism edicts might suggest that if we provide “just the facts,” audiences will understand the meaning of those facts of their own accord. This isn’t a fair assumption in the highly saturated media ecosystem in which we live. Journalists need to provide the historical connections and context whenever and wherever we can — because we have it and, unlike other professions, we have the means to disseminate it. It’s all part of the job.

 

November 30, 2023

Henry Kissinger died this week and, in turn, a flurry of obituaries and retrospectives were published by media outlets around the world. The headlines of these stories mark so wide a spectrum you’d be forgiven for wondering whether they’re all about the same man.

A sample from HuffPost, The Telegraph, USA Today, and the Washington Post, respectively:

What pieces of a long public life are newsrooms to amplify when such a figure dies? For starters, journalists should by no means extend the courtesy to not speak ill of the dead when recording the first draft of history. One could say, “give us just the facts,” but how the media chooses to present the facts in what limited space they have is the name of the game.

As former U.S. Secretary of State, Kissinger could objectively be labeled a diplomat or a statesman to level-set for unfamiliar audiences. The USA Today option above hits this neutral tone without opining on what “shape” that foreign policy took.

It is a fact that Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. A reporter might justify its inclusion in the headline titling his obituary because it is indisputable and an award of import.

It is also a fact that Kissinger directed the secret bombing of Cambodia, a neutral country, at the end of the Vietnam War. Attacks on neutral states are considered war crimes. The full extent of this attack would not be revealed until years later, but it is estimated to have killed as many as 150,000.

This is just one of Kissinger’s many decisions that led to death and violence. As Rolling Stone’s obituary says, “Kissinger played a role in the deaths of so many different peoples that treating each with due consideration requires writing a book.”

Some outlets used words like “divisive,” “dominant,” or “polarizing,” to avoid appearing biased in their assessment of Kissinger’s legacy. If operating from a place of moral clarity and with the above facts in hand, however, newsrooms should feel confident in making the harms he inflicted the salient part of his legacy — and write their memorializing headlines accordingly.

 

January 11, 2024

Donald Trump’s New York civil fraud trial entered closing arguments this week. Earlier this month, presiding Judge Arthur Engoron set out the conditions for Trump to speak during these closing arguments, Newsweek reports. His office and Trump’s legal team went back and forth via email about these conditions and, ultimately, Trump’s team missed the deadline to agree to them, meaning Trump would not be allowed to speak.

The headline above, from CNN, condenses this series of events as if the judge unilaterally barred Trump’s speech without reason or discussion. With the facts in hand, this framing might make it all seem very unfair.

The headline below, from Newsweek, lays out the true impetus for this change of plans — but it doesn’t explain what that deadline was or its consequences.

The CNBC headline below does a better job of combining these elements. It doesn’t mention the missed deadline, but instead emphasizes that Trump did have the option to speak. It accurately connects cause (his refusal) to effect (his being barred from speaking) without laying all fault on the judge.

 

January 18, 2024

Early this morning, Donald Trump wrote the following in a long post on Truth Social:

“EVEN EVENTS THAT ‘CROSS THE LINE’ MUST FALL UNDER TOTAL IMMUNITY, OR IT WILL BE YEARS OF TRAUMA TRYING TO DETERMINE GOOD FROM BAD” … “ALL PRESIDENTS MUST HAVE COMPLETE & TOTAL PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY, OR THE AUTHORITY & DECISIVENESS OF A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WILL BE STRIPPED & GONE FOREVER.”

It is absolutely chilling that the likely GOP nominee for President of the United States is publicly demanding for presidents to have complete criminal immunity, which they do not have and, in a functioning democracy, should not have. It’s especially concerning considering Trump himself is currently facing 91 criminal charges. The phrase “cross the line” adds an ominous tone to this, to say the least — does this imply the use of violence? Where is the “line”?

In my opinion, this should be front page news — it is incredibly alarming, far outside of the norm for a presidential candidate, and a direct threat to democracy. However, when I checked a few times this morning and at the time of publishing, I found no notice of this statement on the homepages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, or CNN.

Of the headlines I did come across, I was struck by The Hill’s, above. Leading with Trump’s “warning” and structuring the sentences as a cause-and-effect accepts his premise that the current lack of presidential immunity will have negative consequences. This is not provable or, thus far, true. All in all, it glosses over his outrageous demand for immunity.

Forbes’ headline, above, at least directly describes Trump’s statement. However, by choosing to use Trump’s phrase “cross the line,” it obscures the fact that what he’s referring to is committing crimes.

The headline from Salon, above, felt the most proportional because it adds the context that experts found Trump’s statements alarming. The quote “infinite crimes,” however, is from another journalist, not from Trump himself, which might be confusing — even if it does sum up Trump’s demand in a way.

 

February 8, 2024

Earlier this week, the U.S. House of Representatives held a vote on whether to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. As CBS News reported, “Democrats accused Republicans of using the impeachment push to score political points ahead of the 2024 election, with immigration being a top voter concern. They also argued that it failed to meet the bar of a high crime or misdemeanor, a criticism shared by legal experts on both sides of the aisle.”

Ideally, headlines covering this conflict would keep this critical context front-of-mind for audiences, signaling the weak case and accusations of its use as a political stunt.

I’d argue the headlines from The Washington Post, The Hill, and ABC News, respectively, below do just the opposite. They all use remarkably similar language to describe the vote: it was a stunning failure.

If such a vote is “stunning” that implies its opposite outcome was seen as a foregone conclusion.

Political insiders tracking this impeachment very well might have assumed it would pass due to the GOP’s usual cohesion on issues that might benefit them come election time, like attacking the Biden administration’s immigration policy. To audiences unfamiliar with this story, however, if this lack of impeachment is “stunning,” that might read as if Mayorkas clearly deserved to be impeached.

When any vote is framed as a “failure,” that means “success” must be the opposite outcome. This frames House votes as a formality wherein the answer is always “yes” no matter the question, instead of what it is: a process by which decisions are made.

Sure, for many in the GOP this result might be a failure — they had a desire that was not fulfilled. But to the members who voted not to impeach Mayorkas, they did not “fail.” A more appropriately neutral phrasing would treat the vote as the choice-making process that it is, such as “the House declined to impeach Mayorkas.”

Among the examples I could find, CBS News (below) got the closest to this value-neutral description by using “Mayorkas survives House impeachment.” Here “survives” implies that same surprise factor but attaches those feelings to Mayorkas. His feelings about this process, after all, might be more safely assumed.

 

February 15, 2024

Donald Trump is in the midst of so many legal battles that they’ve necessitated their own public shorthand. Unfortunately, news media has given the title “hush money trial” to a criminal case Trump faces in New York. The Guardian’s example is above, but any quick Google search will surface many similar results.

But this trial is not truly about paying off adult film actress Stormy Daniels — it’s about falsifying records to cover up criminal activity.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr. said in his initial statement on the indictment, “The People of the State of New York allege that Donald J. Trump repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal crimes that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.”

The phrase “hush money” implies a scandal, but not necessarily fraud or criminal activity. I would have loved to include a headline that used a clearer phrase — perhaps “falsified records trial” — but I simply couldn’t find one that fit the bill. The “hush money” phrase is seemingly ubiquitous. The one exception I found was the headline of an opinion piece from The Daily Beast, below, which is an attempt to correct the record.

 

March 14, 2024

During the GOP response to U.S. President Biden’s State of the Union address, Sen. Katie Britt implied that a woman’s story of sex trafficking and rape took place in the U.S. during the Biden administration when it, in fact, took place in Mexico between 2004 and 2008. The anecdote was misused to criticize the President’s border policies.

I can’t think of a more generous way to frame this event than The New York Times headline below.

“Criticism” here refers to journalists and public figures revealing and publicizing the facts of the misleading story. Sure, some are criticizing Britt for using the story the way she did, but others are simply pointing out the truth. The phrase “amid criticism” here, I think, wrongly implies that this is all a matter of opinion.

The Times’s headline also centers Britt’s defense of this falsehood on a public stage, rather than the falsehood itself. I prefer the Associated Press headline below, which describes the events much more plainly.

 

April 18, 2024

If you came across the CNN headline above, would you have clicked through? In addition to its focus on an individual suit, this story sounds like it might inform readers about the Black Lives Matter movement’s current status, which is important to the U.S. at large. But, this week, this story competed with headlines on everything from Ukraine and Israel to climate change and Donald Trump’s criminal trial. Unless you’re abnormally caught up on global news, I wouldn’t blame you for using your limited reading time on a story that feels more urgent.

What about the headline below, from Vox? More urgent to U.S. audiences, yes?

Now, what if I told you these headlines are about the same story?

The “organizer” in CNN’s headline is prominent activist DeRay Mckesson. He’s been appealing a ruling that found him liable for the injury of a police officer at a protest he helped organize in 2016. An unknown protester threw an object at the officer, who was struck in the face. The officer’s lawyers argued that the First Amendment “does not protect against damage claims if an organizer’s actions are ‘negligent, illegal and dangerous,’” CNN reports.

The Supreme Court announced earlier this week that it will not hear the appeal. The impact of this on public protest is significant.

As Vox reports, “The decision not to hear Mckesson leaves in place a lower court decision that effectively eliminated the right to organize a mass protest in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Under that lower court decision, a protest organizer faces potentially ruinous financial consequences if a single attendee at a mass protest commits an illegal act.” (Emphasis mine.)

I don’t think I could create a better juxtaposition between “reporting the facts” and “reporting what the facts mean” if I tried. For journalists trying to serve our communities with important and actionable information, it is imperative that we think about how we reflect meaning in places like headlines.

Due to our overwhelming information ecosystem, I often say that journalists need to tell audiences that “2 + 2 = 4,” rather than assuming they’ll complete the equation themselves. In this example, the CNN headline is like telling your audience “2x + 2y = ?” and assuming they know both the variables in play and the answer.

Or, to escape my pained math analogy, the difference in these headlines is between informing audiences that their rights may have changed and simply not doing so.

 

April 25, 2024

Last week, Columbia University students began a protest encampment to demand that the institution divest from Israel in wake of the killings in Gaza. Since then, protests at several campuses across the U.S. have sprung up to both echo Columbia students’ demands and/or to stand in solidarity. Protesters have faced punishments (or threats thereof) from their institutions and physical violence from law enforcement.

Scholars have been studying media coverage of protests for decades. I used this scholarship to conduct my own research on Philadelphia outlets’ coverage of local protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. One core framework of this scholarship is the protest paradigm, a pattern identified by James Hertog and Douglas McLeod.

To (extremely annoyingly) quote my own report, “They found that coverage often delegitimizes protest movements via reporting that focuses on the most violent or dramatic aspects of a protest, features an over-reliance on official sources and definitions, fails to explain the context of the movement at hand, and exaggerates the negative consequences of those protests.”

In their work analyzing recent coverage under the protest paradigm, Danielle K. Brown and Summer Harlow categorized news reports into four categories:

• “Riot: Emphasizing disruptive behavior and the use or threat of violence.
• Confrontation: Describing protests as combative, focusing on arrests or “clashes” with police.
• Spectacle: Focusing on the apparel, signs, or dramatic and emotional behavior of protesters.
• Debate: Substantially mentioning protester’s demands, agendas, goals, and grievances.”

Within this framework the Riot, Confrontation, and Spectacle frames are considered delegitimizing of the protest movement at hand because they shift focus from the cause of the protest and its supporters’ proposed solutions (the Debate frame).

I couldn’t help but view headlines and stories about these protests through this framework. I haven’t done any formal assessment of this coverage under the protest paradigm, but I did pull headlines that I think exemplify each frame.

Riot: The headline above from CNN as published by WPSD uses words like “rocked” and “unrest” to emphasize the disruptive, threatening nature of the protests.

Confrontation: The Guardian headline above focuses on arrests and thus the conflict between students and police.

Spectacle: The Semafor headline above discusses the masks students are wearing while they protest.

Debate: And finally, above, the Associated Press manages to work what the students are actually protesting for into the headline!

Any protest is bound to draw out this range of coverage. As this story continues to unfold, consider the proportion of these frames that you encounter and ask yourself whether that ratio amplifies or obscures the story’s most important angles.

 

May 23, 2024

Earlier this month, The New York Times revealed that an upside-down U.S. flag had once flown outside of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s home in January 2021. This display of the U.S. flag is a known symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement, whose followers falsely claim the 2020 election was “stolen” and Donald Trump is the rightful president. Rioters carried the same symbol on the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

A new Times report found that an “Appeal to Heaven” flag flew at Alito’s vacation home in July, August, and September of 2023. The flag, they report, “is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.” Currently on the court’s docket is the case of whether Trump can claim immunity from prosecution over his role in trying to override the will of voters and remain president in 2020.

This is a clear case of a Supreme Court Justice making a political statement — or at least appearing to do so and, in the case of ethical concerns over partisanship or bias, appearance is everything — on a subject they may rule on. Many lawmakers have called on Alito to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election or Jan. 6.

So, how did headlines describe this second flag? Winning the competition for “Least Descriptive,” Newsweek referred to this all as a “flag firestorm.” In second place, The Times called it “provocative.”

Getting more specific, the Associated Press called it a “flag carried by Jan. 6 rioters” while The Guardian went with “rightwing.” And finally, New York Magazine got straight to the point with “insurrectionist flag.”

It absolutely matters how news media frames this flag. In order for Alito to be held accountable for these ethical violations and recuse himself from related cases, journalists must be clear about what these symbols mean. The groups that proudly carry these symbols mean to damage U.S. democracy by calling valid elections into question and subverting the will of the people.

Alignment with these groups — or even the appearance of it — shows Alito is not even pretending to be unbiased on the issue of insurrection. To allow him to join in decisions on these cases makes a mockery of our justice system.

 

June 3, 2024

Last-Week-Me is pretty disappointed with the slate of headlines I saw this week about Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s refusal to recuse himself from cases in which his participation would be viewed as biased due to the insurrection-linked flags flown outside of his homes. “Insurrection-linked,” or a similar phrase that at least hints at why the flags might create an appearance of bias, is what I was looking for atop stories announcing this news.

Which meant that Last-Week-Me is particularly amused that the headline I found that most specifically addressed the problem with said flags was The New York Times again using the word “provocative!” This choice, at least, characterizes the flags in a way that might make someone wonder why Alito was being pressured to recuse himself.

In contrast, NBC News (below) called the incident a “spat” — a word that packs so much dismissiveness into four letters that it almost feels scornful of the audience for caring about Supreme Court ethics. It makes USA Today’s example (also below), which meekly refers to the whole ordeal as “because of flags,” seem righteous by comparison.

Though it doesn’t explain that this headline is in reference to the insurrection flag incident at all, I do appreciate Vox’s attempt (below) at summarizing the meaning of Alito’s statement. Embedded in its snark is commentary on the ineffectiveness of the Supreme Court’s self-policing. A disappointing week, indeed.

 

July 4, 2024

A few short months ago in this very newsletter, I lamented how top stories in SCOTUS news cycles can focus too narrowly on what decisions mean for the cases directly involved without hammering home the precedents they set for the future. This week we sadly got to watch another such cycle unfold.

The New York Times’ example below is a classic case of those too-narrow headlines that “bury the lead,” so to speak. It delivers the result for the case in question without even hinting at the major shift this ruling brings to U.S. democracy as we know it.

Atop its live coverage, The Guardian at least highlighted this “dangerous precedent,” as seen below. However, it did so in a “both sides” comparison for the ages.

By contrast, I love the headline from The Nation below. Is it accurate? Unfortunately, yes. Is it dramatic and eye-catching? Yes — which, to me, is tonally appropriate for this news. But most importantly, it creates meaning from facts. It doesn’t just use this important space to describe the literal SCOTUS decision on a case likely unfamiliar to many. Instead, it focuses on the impact it will have on real people. It uses logic and reasoning to extrapolate what this result means for presidential power and creates a salient hypothetical that immediately telegraphs the seriousness of the event to its audience.

HuffPost took a similar, if snarkier, route below. It is again accurate and dramatic, but makes explicit that this is not a future effect. The SCOTUS decision is precedent now, and there are immediate implications.

This is the kind of meaning-making journalists must take responsibility for. After all, audiences can get bare-bones information anywhere and everywhere. What they can’t get everywhere is expertise that turns information into knowledge by drawing connections between the past, the present, and the future.

 

July 11, 2024

An older man running for president in the U.S. gave a rambling, confusing stump speech earlier this week. As The Guardian reports, the man made a series of baseless claims, including that other nations were sending the U.S. “most of their prisoners,” that the crowd of hundreds before him was one of 45,000, and that electric vehicles need to charge for 3 hours for every 45 minutes of driving. USA Today reports he also bizarrely paused for a full minute in the middle of the speech, and said tourists in Washington D.C., where violent crime is down 20%, “end up getting shot, mugged, raped.”

His opponent is being called unfit for office. A deluge of reports that his party is in disarray and wants him to step off the campaign trail have been published in recent days.

The odd rally speech was given by Donald Trump in Doral, Florida. Yet The Miami Herald chose the extremely flattering headline (someone “cocky” who “struts” is a bit out of tune with the above, no?) below for their recap. Meanwhile, the homepages of outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post amplified plenty of “Should President Biden run?” coverage this week.

At least The Guardian’s headline on the Doral rally below pointed to Trump’s lies and their strange character — he claimed Biden raised bacon prices four-fold, apparently.

I don’t draw this comparison to suggest Biden’s fitness for office should go unexamined. Quite the contrary: a presidential candidate’s ability to run the country should be a main concern of the political press. It’s just extremely clear that this standard is not being applied evenly to both Biden and Trump in any sense.

If you, like me, are frustrated by watching this double-standard play out, you’ll certainly enjoy this week’s must-read, below.