The power of a headline

One of the amazing things about the media is that they have a way of telling an entire story with one headline. This is the perfect example: U.S. troops kill pregnant woman in Iraq.

The problem is most don’t know that headlines are not written by the same people that write the stories. So, what happens is that a person may spend 5 hours on a story learning details and context and a headline person (it’s called the copy desk) will write a headline for the story after reading it once. Headlines don’t provide context!

Nevertheless, context didn’t matter in this case. The troops say the women were in a car that was given warnings about stopping, but it doesn’t matter. The message was clear: U.S. troops kill pregnant women in Iraq.