Journalism 101: get the damn headline right

By Lee Russ

Saturday, November 04, 2006 at 11:37 AM

I'm sure you've heard by now that the government managed to publish on the internet a series of Iraqi documents that essentially tell you how to engineer a nuclear bomb.  But have you noticed the tendency to diminish the story via headlines emphasizing the partisan nature of criticisms?

Take, for example, this from The Boston Globe:

Democrats condemn posting of Iraq arms data--
Accuse the GOP of endangering national security

Boy, here they go again, right?  The Dems jump all over some technical point and it's just politics as usual.  Who can tell what's going on when the two parties engage in this kind of sniping?  Or so you might think from the headline to this prestigious newspaper.

But, this is the 21st century, so lets do what too few readers will, and actually look at the text lead (emphasis added:):

Top Democrats and weapons specialists yesterday assailed the government's decision to publish details about Iraq's defunct weapons programs on the Internet, accusing the White House and the Republican Party of endangering national security to try to convince the public that Saddam Hussein resumed building an atomic bomb after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

What?  Politically neutral weapons experts are aghast? Man, that's different than the headline.  But maybe the rest of the story is about Democratic sniping.

Senior intelligence officials and even the US government's senior weapons investigator in Iraq warned Washington about releasing the data, but the Republican-led Congress pressured the Bush administration by approving a measure that required thousands of those documents to be made public.

"They first tried to do this in 2003," said David Kay , who led the failed search for weapons of mass destruction after the US-led invasion in March 2003. "I opposed it at that time because I was concerned about documents that shed light on supply networks and details of the weapons."
...
Kay and other weapons specialists said the web site made it seem as though the documents were recently discovered. Critics said it was an effort to convince the public that Iraq had an active weapons program when US forces invaded three years ago, even though UN inspectors dismantled it 15 years ago.

Kay and other weapons specialists said the web site made it seem as though the documents were recently discovered. Critics said it was an effort to convince the public that Iraq had an active weapons program when US forces invaded three years ago, even though UN inspectors dismantled it 15 years ago.
...
Kay said yesterday that key administration figures, including Paul D. Wolfowitz , then deputy secretary of defense, also wanted to release the classified information, especially when it became apparent that Iraq had not restarted its weapons programs. After warning him of the consequences about making bomb instructions public, Kay said Wolfowitz reluctantly agreed to keep the documents classified.

But powerful Republicans in the House and Senate pushed through a resolution earlier this year that forced intelligence agencies to review the material and publish as much of it as possible.
...
 Kay agreed, saying, "It is the same politicization that took place before the war. "

Read the story for yourself.  There's very little in it that involves Democratic carping, just a fraction of the space devoted to criticism from scientists and weapons inspectors.

The purpose of a headline: to summarize the main point of a news story, so that readers can gauge whether they want to continue past the headline to the story itself.

No way does this headline serve any purpose other than to minimize the impact of the story.

And the media are confused about the loss of public confidence in our journalists?  I'd love to see the details on the job requirements for headline writer at the Globe in, say, 1980, and what they paid for the job,and compare it to today's job description and pay class.