If you’re not a journalist, here’s a trade secret: The person who wrote an article often isn’t the same person who wrote the headline.
Editors write many headlines — certainly in print, often online. They edit the headlines for length, for house style, for eye-grabbing capability, for click-bait and for search-engine optimization. Sometimes we writers submit a headline that we expect will be rewritten. Sometimes we don’t even bother.
This gets problematic at times, because sometimes the editor writes something the author doesn’t argue in the piece — and doesn’t even believe.
The New York Times op-ed page had two of the most famous recent sensationalist headlines that hurt the op-ed authors: Mitt Romney’s “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” and Timothy Geithner’s “Welcome to the Recovery.”
Neither headline contradicted the author’s argument, but both presented in a way that the author wouldn’t have.
Recently, two of my colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute have had such an experience while writing for the Washington Post, resulting in their getting attacked for views they don’t hold.
Brad Wilcox wrote a piece that pointed to data showing “Married women are notably safer than their unmarried peers, and girls raised in a home with their married father are markedly less likely to be abused or assaulted than children living without their own father.” The Post’s unfortunate headline: “One Way to End Violence Against Women: Stop Taking Lovers and Get Married.” The subhed said women would be safer “hitched to their baby daddies.”
This put the onus on women, drew causation where Wilcox had pointed to correlation and overstated the power of that correlation.
This week, AEI scholar Michael Strain wrote a piece in which he argued that a Federal Reserve chairwoman should not “be expressing concern over whether income inequality is un-American.”
Strain wrote, “The Fed chair shouldn’t sound like a left-leaning politician opining about hot-button political issues.” He also wrote of Yellen, “despite this misstep, I forecast [she] will be an outstanding Fed chair.”
The dangers, Strain argued, are mostly that Yellen’s comments could be confused for taking a political side:
The Post’s headline:
“Janet Yellen is in danger of becoming a partisan hack”
But if Strain actually thought this, why would he say she was definitely going to be an excellent chair? What Strain was arguing was, if I were to write a headline: “Janet Yellen is in danger of becoming a political lightning rod.”
The Post’s “partisan hack” headline was unfortunate, because Strain’s liberal critics ended up arguing against the headline. Jonathan Chait and Ryan Cooper were two. When Strain pointed out to Cooper that Cooper was arguing with something Strain didn’t write, Cooper at first kind of agreed, but then decided knocking an author for his headline is “fair game.”
But here’s the thing about inflammatory headlines: If they contradict what the writer believes, and if the editor doesn’t actually share the view being expressed in the headline, then writers like Cooper and Chait end up arguing with a belief held by nobody involved.
That doesn’t help anyone.
The way to fix this of course, is for editors to stop writing headlines that the writers don’t agree with.
