The morality of headline writing

There is a thought provoking article, WaPo’s ‘Anti-Muslim’ Hate Crime Headline Hoax by Ian Tuttle.

The issue that Tuttle is focusing on is the Washington Post's repeated efforts to make a headline match the facts of the article.

The first headline is:

Man stabs two at a bus stop after asking them if they're Muslim

How would you interpret that headline? I would understand the implication to be that someone attacked two other people because they were Muslim.

Since that didn't match the facts in the article, the headline writer had a second shot at it.

Police: Muslim man stabs two after discussion about religious beliefs

How would you interpret that new headline? My inference would be that three Muslims were discussing religious matters and a fight erupted leading to two of them being stabbed by the third. A possible secondary reading would be that there was an ecumenical discussion and the Muslim participant attacked the other two.

The facts still don't match the headline so the headline writer returned with a third attempt.

Police: Man stabs two after asking about religious beliefs

So now we're at a point where it is perhaps a simple religious fanatic of any persuasion.

And there it stands for the time being subject to further revision. While not fully revelatory, it is at least consistent with the facts.

And the facts are these:

What seems to have happened (police are investigating) is that Terrence Lavaron Thomas, a Muslim, asked strangers at a Southfield, Mich., bus stop whether or not they were Muslim, also. Two of them said that they were not. Thomas proceeded to stab the pair with a three-inch folding knife.

That's quite a different story than any of the headlines would indicate. ISIS and Al-Qaeda have called upon their followers and the faithful to attack the infidel wherever they live. Such attacks have now occurred in France, Sweden, Denmark, and elsewhere around Europe in the past month.

With that global Jihad as a context, it is fair to ask whether this is simply an unbalanced fellow launching an attack as a consequence of his mental illness, or whether this is a considered but isolated attack or whether this is part of a globally inspired war on non-Muslims.

You can see why the Washington Post might have wanted to shy away from the factually accurate headline

Muslim man in Detroit attacks and wounds two strangers for not being Muslim

Why I find this interesting is that it raises the question of what is the purpose of a headline. I would guess that it is something like:

Get readers to read the article

Provide readers an accurate snapshot of the content of the article

Its not enough to know the goals, you have to know their relative importance. I am guessing that the weighting is something like 80% on getting them to read the article and 20% on the headline reflecting the content.

But in this instance there seems to be some other dynamic in play.

Muslim man in Detroit attacks and wounds two strangers for not being Muslim

Would likely serve both the primary and the secondary objectives of headline writing. So what third rule is there that overrides the default effective headline?

It would sound great to say we can reverse engineer our way to clarity but the reality is that all we can do is speculate.

Hard to tell. Its clear that they are not afraid to identify that Islam is involved since they use that in the first instance. What seems to be the sticking point is a reluctance to establish a causal relationship: A Muslim man attacked two people solely because they were non-Muslim. It can't be because of any general sensitivity to religion as a motive force because there are innumerable examples where the Post has linked an individual's Christianity to a negative outcome on a causal basis.

Perhaps the issue is that Muslim's are a minority. In other words there is a different rule for majority versus minority religious status.

Perhaps the Washington Post is fully on-board with the Administration's efforts to steer the conversation away from religion (Islamic terrorism) and focus solely on the terrorism aspect.

All these seem unlikely stretches. The answer is that I don't know. I can't construct an argument for a third rule that is both logical and consistent with the data.

The reality is likely that this individual is going to turn out to have a history of mental illness and/or a criminal record and therefore his claimed religion will likely have no significance.

But one way or another, the Washington Post, like so much of the mainstream media, is going to end up in their reporting to look like they have a truth they don't want their readers to know, leading to a decline in trust, leading to fewer readers. The problem will resolve itself eventually but not likely in a manner beneficial to the reporters and shareholders of the Washington Post.