Biasing a headline is strictly against journalism edicts of old, but it’s becoming acceptable and justified as “truth”. Don’t be fooled.
Continued after photo
Bias by news sources, very often comes from what is chosen from multiple truths within a story. For this article I am going to use the recent trending news about voter law changes, especially what happened in the state of Georgia.
Depending on who is writing the story you’ll notice headlines on the Georgia voting law change, with one using the term voter restriction law, and the other using the term voter integrity law. Both are true, and both are biased in a headline that does not recognize the other perspective.
So, how would a headline look, that was not biased? Like this:
Georgia Makes Significant Changes in Voter Legislation
Then an ethical journalist writes the story striving to show what was changed or added in the new legislation, and either stops right there, or gets an equal amount of opinion from those in the restriction camp, and those in the integrity camp.
I’m going to stop here as I have moved outside of the bias of headlines, and I’ll write a future article on using lead in text on social media to have a good neutral headline, but pervert it with lead in text that is heavily biased.