“But they also readily volunteered objections to the same names: Gingrich has personal baggage, Palin’s too inexperienced, Romney pushed Obama-like health care while governor of Massachusetts and Pawlenty lacks charisma.

“Given those commonly heard objections among rank-and-file party workers, it appears that no potential Republican candidate can yet claim to be the heir apparent and the race could be wide open.”

Note that the word “hate” appears nowhere in those graphs, yet the headline given the story by somebody besides Thomma is this: “Unified by hatred of Obama, GOP still seeks a challenger.”

A quick Google check shows that head appeared on the McClatchy web site, the Miami Herald, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Oregon Olympian, and the Sacremento Bee. No doubt other news outlets also went with the same offending head, which was put on the Thomma text by a McClatchy editor.

Why should you care about this discrepancy between a reporter’s copy and the headline put on it by an editor? Because this is a vivid example of something that happens fairly regularly in the media and which leads to confusion among some media critics who get all bent out of shape at reporters like Thomma over something he almost certainly didn’t do.

This blog post is being written early Sunday morning and I’ve already received several tweets and emails from outraged conservatives, some of whom clearly think the reporter wrote the headline. This is not the first time I’ve received such comments about offending headlines.

So, once again, let me remind the critics – reporters don’t write headlines, editors write headlines.

Thus, the headline in this instance clearly does not capture the essence of what Thomma wrote, but it likely does provide an insight into the lack of journalistic ethics of at least one McClatchy editor who used the story as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at the GOP.