Someone who goes through alot of news pieces a day may not read everything, and might just skim through the headlines. Once he reads a certain headline, he would make his judgment on the subject the article is talking about, or atleast believe what the headline is stating. But this practice is incorrect as headlines can be sometimes misleading. One headline might say that a company has beaten expectations with their earnings, leading a reader to assume that the company is making profits, however, they migh just mean that the loss is less than expected.
The image above is another example of misleading headlines. The first headline on the top left states that Japan maintained its position as second largest economy in the world, while the other two headlines are saying that China surpassed Japan as the world’s second economy. The first headline is from Al Arabiya, while the other two are from Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. What is the problem? Is someone lying to the readers? Is Western media more reliable than Arabic media? The answer is simple. The articles use different measures of the size of the economy. The Al Arabiya article uses GDP for the first half of 2010 ($ 2.587 trillion for Japan vs. $2.532 for China), while the Bloomberg and WSJ articles use the quarterly GDP ($1.288 vs. $1.337).
So remeber to not just read the headlines, and read the full article.
P.S. I hope my article’s headline wasn’t misleading.
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Loading ...Tags: Al Arabiya, Bloomberg, China economy, Chinese economy bigger than Japanese, Headlines, Wall Street Journal, WSJ
That clarifies things! Good point.
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ah one of my eternal peeves: the headline scam. there are two kinds of people in this world:
* those who read because they want to
* those who read because they have to (i.e. glanced at a newspaper while passing by the newsstand)
20/80
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