AP continues to craft inaccurate headlines
May 22, 2015
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I've long assumed that just about anything written by a journalist has only the most tenuous relationship to reality (see Michael Crichton's "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect").
Few news agencies are as skilled at the AP, however, at crafting headlines--often the only part of a story a casual reader notes--that communicate a narrative that's precisely the opposite of the underlying facts.
As one example, here's a prevaricating AP headline from October 22, 2014:
In that case the actual facts turned out to be that the man shot was engaged in a terrorist attack on a bus stop, and had already managed to kill a 3-year-old before being engaged and stopped by Israeli police. Replace the word"man" with "terrorist" and the headline would have accurately narrated the events. Instead, the headline falsely implies an act of unjustified violence by Israeli authorities. (In that case the AP withdrew the headline an hour in the face of considerable outrage.)