A couple of deeply unflattering and unnecessarily sneering headlines from the Washington Post this week have me worried about the paper’s night editors.
Consider, for example, the following headline, which was published Wednesday evening: “David Gelernter, fiercely anti-intellectual computer scientist, is being eyed for Trump’s science adviser.”
Gelernter is a Yale computer scientist. As the story itself notes, he is the literal definition of a genius.
Reporter Sarah Kaplan writes:
Gelernter is a pioneer in the field of parallel computation, a type of computing in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously. The programming language he developed in the 1980s, Linda, made it possible to link together several small computers into a supercomputer, significantly increasing the amount and complexity of data that computers can process. Since then he has written extensively about artificial intelligence, critiquing the field’s slow progress and warning of AI’s potential dangers.
Gelernter is also a fierce critic of academia. The problem with so many campuses and faculty lounges, he has long argued, is that they promote and support the idea that opposing thoughts should be silenced and expelled. Gelernter has also argued that modern academia has an unhealthy attachment to credentialism, which subordinates unique ideas and experimentation to formal qualifications.
From this, the Washington Post’s editors characterize the Yale computer scientist, who, again, is an actual genius, as “fiercely anti-intellectual”?
Okay, then.
The other strange and oddly dismissive Washington Post headline published this week involves former Republican Georgia Gov. Sonny Purdue, who has been nominated to head the Department of Agriculture.
Purdue is also an evangelical Christian who clearly believes in the efficacy of prayer.
This is the news alert that the Post sent out late Wednesday evening: “Trump picks former Georgia governor Sonny Purdue, who once led a prayer for rain, for agriculture secretary.”
A Christian who believes in prayer? What will they think of next!
As noted before by the Washington Examiner, it’s a little-known fact in the media that editors, and not reporters, write most news headlines.
Reporters do the reporting, yes, but editors usually take over when it comes to picking out a strong headline.
If editors are responsible for staining these otherwise good Post stories with ridiculous headlines, then a couple of reporters somewhere should be having a very long and angry talk with their supervisors.
