In LA

A remarkable headline?

I took a look at Google News this afternoon and noticed the following remarkable headline, “Palin Misleads: Accuses Obama of Supporting Tax Hikes”. That headline is not remarkable on its face, but what took me by surprise was that it was apparently the headline of an article on FOXNews.com (slogan “We Report. You Decide.”). I decided long ago that Fox News is partisan in the general direction of the current Republican party, so I did a double-take when noting that they’d published an article with a headline so sharply critical of the GOP Vice Presidential candidate.

Click image to see screenshot at full size.

I clicked through and read the article. Though it wasn’t the attack-dog piece on Palin that the headline had led me to expect, it did include some salient criticisms of her recent statements –and was more balanced than I’ve come to expect from Fox. Then I noticed that the article’s headline had been defanged from the original, and now reads,”Palin Accuses Obama of Supporting Tax Hikes”. My guess is that when the article was first posted, the headline included the word “Misleads”, and this is the headline that was present when the Google News bot crawled the Fox News site, indexed the article, and built the database that is used to auto-generate Google News pages. Sometime in the 10 minutes that elapsed from the moment I loaded the Google News front page and clicked the Fox News article, the editors at Fox News changed the article’s headline to change the focus from the fact that Palin made misleading statements to the simple fact that she made accusations. I wonder if the contents of the article were similarly adjusted.

Click image to see screenshot at full size.

As an aside, I’d encourage anyone who is curious about the respective Obama and McCain tax plans to take a look at the infographic and discussion on this page. That infographic is an attempt by some statistically-minded bloggers to bring some clarity to the table and correct the distortions and mistakes made by many such graphics recently published in print media. Rathergate proved that blogs and internet forums can make up a powerful “5th estate” to keep tabs on and correct the media’s failings. I think it’s interesting to see that this netizen watchdog role encompasses even infographics.

Technorati Tags: Fifth Estate, Fourth Estate, Fox News, McCain, Media, Obama, Palin, Politics

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Media, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.