About Unheadline News

There's a tension between the often excellent reporting in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, and their headlines, which tend to normalize and obfuscate the insane speech and behavior of the current president of the United States.

Some years ago, in the before times, I saw an exchange on Twitter in which people were haranguing Maggie Haberman about normalizing Trump,and in reply she pointed to some in-depth, exceptionally well-reported stories she had worked on which had uncovered wrongdoing by the Trump administration. (I'm not going to that hellhole to find the exchange, but I believe this characterization to be mostly correct.)

She was right; NYT had uncovered wrongdoing and had reported about it in-depth. However, it seems to be the case that most people who "read the news" do so not by reading in-depth articles but by scanning headlines, and a person scanning headlines in 2024 might reasonably come to the conclusion that the most critical issue of the time was Biden's age rather than the fact that a fascist with the cognitive abilities of a disturbed 10 year old had a better-than-average chance of taking power.

Here is the headline that pushed me over the edge and got me thinking about this project:

Trump Praises Tariffs, and William McKinley, to Power Brokers
In an address about the kind of economy he hopes to build for the 21st century, the former president harked back to the end of another century: the 19th.
September 5th, 2024

The headline and summary paint a picture of Trump having an economic plan based in his studies of economics and history. In fact, Trump has not demonstrated that he even understands what a tariff is (quite the contrary, he has repeatedly described it as a tax that other countries pay), nor that he has ever read any book whatever, much less tomes of history or economics. The story itself describes his performance as a "rambling speech billed as a major economic address" and suggests it was not what the attendees had expected. Trump speaks in bullshit and has no idea what he's talking about, and that is the important story, and yet here he is in the headline "harking back" to the the McKinley era.

Reading headlines like this makes me want to reach through the internet and "correct" them. This is me scratching that itch.