Badly Worded Headline of the Day
Skepticism Seems to Erode Europeans’ Faith in Rice - New York Times.
Problems with this headline:
- Weak verb choice–”seems to erode” instead of the stronger “erodes”
- Poor choice of nouns: Skepticism is roughly the same thing as a lack of faith; both terms are vague and abstract.
Of course, the story isn’t much better. It’s badly biased; since it’s marked “International,” not “Op-Ed,” I assume its supposed to be a hard-news story. Quotes like “Did anybody believe her on this continent, aroused as rarely before by a raft of reports about secret prisons, C.I.A. flights, allegations of torture and of ‘renditions,’ or transfers, of prisoners to third countries so they can be tortured there?” and “Parsing through the speech, Mr. Tyrie pointed out example after example where, he said, Ms. Rice was using surgically precise language to obfuscate and distract” tend to give it away.
And the NYTimes is the country’s top newspaper? Tsk.
Anyways, I’d reword the headline as:
“European Leaders Doubt Rice’s Testimony”
Anything with an active, strong verb and good, concrete nouns.
December 7th, 2005 at 10:54 am
Sounds like you picked up a writing style in your technical writing class.
BTW - I’d argue that the Wall Street Journal is the countries leading paper.
December 7th, 2005 at 1:07 pm
That, and I took Principles of Journalism last semester.
Actually, according to an LA Times article, USA Today has the most subscribers of any newspaper, followed by the Wall Street Journal and then the NY Times.
Of course, that doesn’t count the Times’ subsidiary companies all over the US, like the Spartanburg Herald-Journal.
I do think that the WSJ is of much higher quality than the NY Times, definitely.
December 7th, 2005 at 6:26 pm
I’ll agree with 2., but 1. is just good epistemology. They don’t know for sure that faith has been eroded, and even if they do, they can’t be so precise about the cause as you want.