Reading Between the Lines
Headlines vs. Content
Friends often ask how I identify facts vs. bias and misinformation and how I figure out what’s most important in this era of information overload. This week, I thought I’d write about one practice I apply when consuming the news.
During the height of the COVID pandemic, it was incredibly common to see a headline make an extreme claim that the evidence within the same article did not back up.
This piece from The Seattle Times in August 2021 is a great example.
The clear implication of the headline is that the Delta variant of COVID-19 is filling hospitals in Washington state.
The body of the article tells a different story. SARS-COV-2 wasn’t responsible for the vast majority of hospitalizations and was only a single-digit percentage of overall hospitalizations in the state. It wasn’t fake news– the headline is technically accurate and the article is honest– but the headline is deceptive.
Above is another excellent example, this one from CNN last year. This headline is better than some– it includes the information that most kids who catch Covid don’t die of it as often as people in other age brackets– but it still implies a high risk of death. The content of the article is pretty good. It links to the study it’s based on in the very first sentence. It highlights that fewer than 1% of all deaths from COVID have been kids. It clarifies that “leading” means the 8th highest cause of death, having passed the flu and pneumonia. What the article leaves out, though, was important enough to the study authors to include it in their second paragraph under “Key Points” as one of the first things that you see. It’s these two tiny details: “COVID-19 deaths constituted 2% of all causes of death in this age group,” and the study covers “children and young people” ages 0-19.
Do you think of something that causes 2% of deaths as a “leading” cause of death? Do you consider 18 and 19-year-olds– legal adults– children? Maybe. Or maybe the headline oversells the content of the article. I think that a clearer, more accurate headline would have been something like, “COVID-19 surpasses the flu, other respiratory illnesses in causing deaths among children and young adults.”
Though this was incredibly common during the height of the COVID pandemic, it continues to be common wherever media seeks to persuade the audience of a specific narrative or conclusion instead of allowing their audience to draw their own conclusions from the evidence presented in the story. Let’s look at some other examples.
In a similar vein, reading this article, what age range do you think is covered by “child gun deaths?”
Did you guess 0-12, stopping at teens? 0-17, stopping at adulthood?
Would you have ever guessed 1-19, conveniently excluding all infant deaths and including two years of legal adulthood?1 In this case, the article doesn’t even differentiate between children, adolescents, and adults.
We can still find the data: Like the previous example, the cited study is linked in the very first sentence. Click through to it and you’ll discover that:
Motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of death for children and adolescents, representing 20% of all deaths; firearm-related injuries were the second leading cause of death, responsible for 15% of deaths. Among firearm deaths, 59% were homicides, 35% were suicides, and 4% were unintentional injuries (e.g., accidental discharge),” and, “The leading causes of death varied between younger and older children. Among children 1 to 4 years of age, drowning was the most common cause of death, followed by congenital abnormalities and motor vehicle crashes. Children most commonly drown in swimming pools (1 to 4 years of age) and in pools, rivers, and lakes4 (≥5 years of age). Among older, school-aged children (5 to 9 years of age), death was relatively rare, representing only 12% of all deaths in children and adolescents. In this age group, malignant neoplasm was the leading cause of death, followed by motor vehicle crashes and congenital abnormalities. Unlike in children 1 to 4 years of age, drowning was only the fourth most common cause of death among those 5 to 9 years of age, which potentially reflects widespread swim training among school-aged children.5
The majority (68%) of youth who died did so during adolescence. Among these adolescent youth (10 to 19 years of age), injury deaths from motor vehicle crashes, firearms, and suffocation were the three leading causes of death; these findings reflect social and developmental factors that are associated with adolescence, including increased risk-taking behavior, differential peer and parental influence, and initiation of substance use.”
In other words, the firearms are only a “leading cause of death” in the case of adolescents and adult teenagers, split almost entirely between homicide and suicide. This is important! If you’re trying to solve the problem of “child gun deaths” you might think that we need more laws requiring gun safes, or more firearm education, or more restrictive gun laws, when what you almost certainly really need is intervention in gang violence and suicidality.
What is often happening is two-fold, I think.
First, writers are often only responsible for articles and someone else on staff, who may or may not be at all familiar with the story, writes the headline. Headlines with stories are meant to grab attention more than they are to convey truth.
Second, journalists often write about unfamiliar topics, so they find and interview alleged subject matter experts or use Google (or an LLM) to learn about the topic. Those “experts” often carry agendas, Google and LLMs can hallucinate claims, and journalists (who often exist in severe ideological echo chambers) can be extremely bad at noticing when a source presents only partial information, a conclusion that doesn’t follow from the evidence, or something altogether fictional.
In summary, there are three rules here:
Always read past the headline.
If the article cites an external source, read it, too.
Look for definitions of terms in articles, especially if they cite data.
Following these will help you avoid sharing exaggerated or misleading information even when it comes from a seemingly credible source. Finally, when in doubt, wait it out. Waiting for more accurate information is almost always better for a layperson than prioritizing posting speed.
Happy reading!