By arthur Weinreb
Friday, December 1, 2006
Misleading headlines are just one way that the print media uses to slant their news. a recent example occurred in the Ottawa Sun's reporting of the results of the byelections that were held in two Canadian ridings this past week. The article reported that Raymond Gravel, the male hooker turned priest turned politician had easily won his Montreal area riding for the Bloc Quebecois. The other riding that was up for grabs was that of London North Centre where the Liberals managed to hold on to the seat that Joe Fontana vacated in order to run for mayor in London's recent municipal elections.
The ruling Conservative Party was not expected to win either seat; seats that they had not held prior to the vacancies occurring. While the government party had a chance of winning the London seat (as did Elizabeth May of the Green Party) no one was really counting on that to happen. and the Bloc win in Quebec was pretty well a foregone conclusion.
The article even quotes Stephen MacKinnon, the national director of the Liberal Party of Canada, saying that the byelection results should not be interpreted as a referendum on the Harper government.
Contrary to the comments made by MacKinnon and Conservative strategist Goldy Hyder, the headline of the Kathleen Harris article was "Byelections seen as Tory litmus test”. The only support for elections being a litmus test was the statement by Harris that "some” unidentified people saw the byelections as a test of the Harper government. But the headline was the exact opposite of the actual views expressed in the article.
Now it could be that there was no attempt to purposely slant the reportage of the elections and that this was simply a case of the headline writer either misinterpreting the column or simply making a mistake. What can be worse than this type of error is when the headline is not only slanted, but is completely factually wrong.
Earlier this week, arden Diebel, a Calgary man who was convicted of second degree murder in the killing of his girlfriend was sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole for 12 years. an article that appeared in the Edmonton Sun reported the sentencing and the fact that relatives of Kelly Quinn, the slain woman, were outraged at the 12 year parole ineligibility period; the Crown had been seeking the maximum period of 25 years. The headline that was not just misleading but completely wrong was "Killer gets 12 years”. Of course the sentence was not 12 years but life. Contrary to the widely held view, there are some people who receive life sentences and actually die of old age in prison. Unless they are truly infamous, much like planes that cross the ocean and land safely, we never hear about them. We only hear about those who are released when many think they should not be, as convicted wife killer Colin Thatcher recently was. In any event, Diebel did not receive a 12 year sentence – the headline was wrong.
While headlines provide the reader with a clue about what the story is about, they can often be slanted or in some cases completely wrong. People who skimmed the Diebel article will come away from it thinking that he received only a sentence of 12 years for brutally murdering his girlfriend. Readers should keep these examples in mind and not assume that a newspaper article or column will necessarily correspond to the promised headline.
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