What a Difference a Headline Makes
This morning I picked up my Saturday PLAIN DEALER and read the following headline:
“Could miners have lived?… By following procedures, they may have missed best chance for survival”
In my usual rational way, I began to rant and to rave in the general direction of my husband, Tim, who has learned to listen with one ear and continue whatever he is doing with the other. How can they be so insensitive? Aren’t these miners families’ facing enough without all of this second-guessing? And then, Tim says, well what does the article say?
Silence filled the room. Then I quietly sat down in the rocking chair with a cup of coffee and proceeded to read an article that actually was not badly written and did nothing more than state that the miners could not have known that less than 1500 feet away from them was good air. By the way, this article was written by two NEW YORK TIMES reporters. To read the article go to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
I am referring you to the NEW YORK TIMES because the headline in that publication was,
“Miners Went by Book, but Time and Air Ran Out”
I don’t know exactly why, but for some reason, it just hits me as being a much more accurate headline. What do you think?
January 7th, 2006 at 8:06 pm
The whole proper procedures thing made me angry. It speaks to the inflexibility of organizations…
January 7th, 2006 at 8:25 pm
Now that we’ve read the article, I tend to see why you had the initial strong reaction to the PD headline–it’s all a question of attitude and approach. The PD is no longer the patrician, classy, refined, restrained, dignified publication it was when, back in the late ’50s, I was a proud carrier, with 110 Sundays and 50 dailies, and I think Tom Vail was the publisher or editor. Today, the PD seems to leer, to offer a hot insiders’ tip, to proffer innuendo, to suggest an impropriety, to report the facts while steering you to read between the lines. What’s that Italian saying? “The fish rots (stinks?) from the head down”? Who owns the paper today? Who’s the publisher? Who’s the editor? Who had the final say on that “snarky” headline? (All you young people–did I use the term “snarky” properly?)
January 8th, 2006 at 9:53 am
I prefer the NYT headline because it sounds as though the men had died an impossibly long time before the rescuers were ever going to get down there.
This accident haunts me because for years, images of one of my favorite movies, Matewan have also haunted me, and that’s a result of having seen the devastation of strip mining, firsthand, through volunteer work in a Southeastern Kentucky mining town in the early 80s. To say that how the mining industry had shaped the landscape and the people there was frightening is a gross understatement.
January 10th, 2006 at 11:50 am
It would seem that the once-venerable PD has followed the lead of some of the TV news broadcasts, most notably that on Channel 19. The teasers thrown out on that channel all evening are very obviously geared toward titillating the audience, even when it comes to the weather report. When one tunes in, one discovers that the headlines are invariably either mightily overblown or downright misleading. But in our tabloid-loving country, it’s the outrageous that grabs the ratings and readers, so journalism now panders to our collective taste for chills and thrills. Is the PD adding to the dumbing-down of America, or just giving the people what they want?