Irresponsible headlines: Digg a contributor.

Hundreds of headlines throughout the world today read something like this.
Hawking: Climate change worse than terror. The story ran “over the wire,” which means the Associated Press picked it up (or wrote it) and news organizations around the world can run AP stories. Of course, Diggers report it that way too. That’s how I found it.

Read the articles, and you’ll find that Stephen Hawking never says these words. He talks about the problem, but he says something quite different. “There’s a realization that we are changing our climate for the worse,” Hawking said, “That would have catastrophic effects. Although the threat is not as dire as that of nuclear weapons right now, in the long term we are looking at a serious threat.” Hawking never said climate change was worse than terror. He inferred quite the opposite. I say inferred because the writer is the one that equates nuclear weapons with terrorism.

How did this happen?
The writers don’t write the headlines. Copy editors do. Copy editors are like marketers. Their job is to get people to read the article by coming up with great headlines for the stories. But in this case, it’s the headline that’s more of a story, even if it isn’t quite true.

What will happen?
The media will report it anyway. They don’t want to be left out of covering “a big story,” and coverage is their business model. It’s a huge problem in the press today.