Wednesday morning, The Hill published a story entitled, “Texas school district threatens to suspend students who protest gun violence”. Except it’s a statement that wildly mischaracterizes the story by omitting a key piece of information.
The story reads as follows:
A superintendent in a Texas school district is warning that students will be suspended if they cause any disruptions to protest gun violence.Needville Independent School District (ISD) Superintendent Curtis Rhodes said in a letter that was sent to families and posted on social media that students would be suspended for three days if they took part in the protests happening following the deadly Florida high school shooting, The Houston Chronicle reported.In the statement, Rhodes said that Needville ISD is “very sensitive” to violence in schools.
And then they get to the part that makes the headline far less inflammatory, and essentially, a nothing-burger:
“Please be advised that the Needville ISD will not allow a student demonstration during school hours for any type of protest or awareness!!” Rhodes said.
Skip school, get suspended. Nothing too out of the ordinary there.
Headlines are challenging. With so much news coming from a plethora of sites, how do you effectively communicate key points of a story, keep it brief, and make an article interesting enough to earn attention? These are questions we deal with all day every day. That said, there are plenty of ways to easily convey the gist of a story without leading a reader to believe something incongruent to the facts. Not all outlets are quite so careful.
There is a fine line between clickbait and misleading headlines.
This has been a rough few days for the media at large. Their two favorite subjects: gun control and Russia mania are eating up all the headline space. Rather than step carefully and judicially deliver facts, they’ve made fools of themselves.
CNN’s Chris Cuomo tweeted a completely false story based on an internet meme, then lied about it when confronted.
CNN tracked down an old lady in Florida and harassed her about her pre-election Facebook activity, coming one step short of accusing her of colluding with Russian agents. All of this happened in her front yard.
And Newsweek was forced to retract a story about Franken’s resignation, which suggested Franked was taken down by a bot network (Spoiler: he was not).
You will note none of these outlets are conservative-friendly.
This, dear media, is why everyone hates you.
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