The Power of Headlines

I've written before about how most people get their news by reading headlines, not news articles. An unfortunate aspect of this phenomenon is that it puts a lot of power into the hands of the people who write headlines.

Here is a case in point that appeared prominently displayed on the front page of Yahoo News.

The headline for this article is "Rockets hit Lebanon despite cease-fire".

When I first read the headline, I was interested, because I assumed that Israeli rockets were striking Lebanon. After all, Hezbollah wouldn’t bomb Lebanon, would they?

However, the body of the article talks about Hezbollah rockets hitting southern Lebanon.

Highlighting the fragility of the peace, Hezbollah guerrillas fired at least 10 Katyusha rockets that landed in southern Lebanon early Tuesday, the Israeli army said, adding that nobody was injured.

If I had been too lazy to open and read the article, I would have gone away with the (false) belief that Israel was still firing rockets into Lebanon, in violation of the cease fire.

As I'm sure the headline creator intended...


(I suppose the use of the word “rockets” instead of “missiles” should have tipped me off, since the media always talks about Hezbollah "rockets" and Israeli "missiles", but that’s a pretty subtle way of identifying weaponry.)