Guardrails for News Headlining

Does the headline’s claim or assertion sit at odds with the actual findings in a story? Is the headline truthful about the story or is it setting up false expectations? Does the headline imply cause and effect, even when the story does not? Is the story’s thrust suggesting one reality at play, and the headline is elevating or exaggerating or overstating something else? These problems are more common than we think. They violate the norm of truthfulness. The fact-checking organization FullFact calls such headlines edlines and compiled a list of examples here. 

Risks/Costs: There are real costs to this principle being violated. 

1. In their research on headlines and their influence on learning, Nick Carcioppolo, Di Lun, and Soroya Julian McFarlane found that “reading the full article with an accurate headline resulted in the highest recognition and comprehension.” On the other hand, they found that reading correcting information within an article is likely not enough “to overcome the deleterious impact of a clickbait headline.” In other words, poor headlines damage the epistemic journey even for committed readers, who have taken the trouble to read the full story. 
2. In another effort, researchers Jennifer Allen, Duncan Watts, and David Rand quantified the impact of misinformation on Facebook. The Chicago Tribune article titled, “A healthy doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID vaccine; CDC is investigating why,” falls in the category of implying cause and effect when the story did not. This story had massive reach; it was the most-viewed URL across 13,206 URLs during the research time period. It was seen by 54.9 million people on Facebook (>20% of Facebook’s U.S. user base). The story itself indicated uncertainty surrounding the true cause of death, but the researchers pointed out that the headline's implication was that the vaccine may have been harmful to health. There are consequences: 

“We found that the only content dimension that consistently predicted a headline’s effect on vaccination intentions was the extent to which the headline suggested that the vaccine was harmful to a person’s health.” - Allen et al. 

Mitigation: Usually well-reported stories already have the truth of the details in the story. Have a collaborative workflow. Let the story’s producers or reporters view the headline options and weed out the bad ones or veto them. Pick from the rest. 

Example of what not to do, a hypothetical bad headline: 

CJR’s Feven Merid interviewed elections expert Tina Barton on responsible coverage in 2024, where headlining came up. Barton said: 

For example, if a headline reads, “Michigan's second-largest city lost an entire tray of mail ballots,” it implies that the election clerk was careless when, in reality, the tray was unaccounted for by the United States Postal Service, not the clerk.” 

“Such sensationalized reporting can lead to public outrage and erode trust in election officials, making it critical for journalists to be precise in their wording and ensure that all aspects of a story are accurately represented. This means not only getting the facts right but also considering how headlines and stories can influence public perception and behavior.” 

See more here: Q&A: Elections expert Tina Barton on how the media can cover voting responsibly--Columbia Journalism Review

A guardrail example: For stories that appear on NPR’s website, their general assignment desk directly allows reporters to weigh in. Reporters draft the initial headline, which the editor reviews, and discusses options with the reporter soliciting further input. “And between them, they will settle on what they think is the perfect headline for that story.” Another NPR reporter and podcaster captures this well: “Headlines seem to work best when they are written by journalists who understand the complete story and enjoy writing them.” 

Official authorities–federal, regional, and local leaders and appointees are leading stakeholders in policy making by virtue of the positions they hold. They have an interest in not just being quoted in stories, but in their claims being headlined. 

Risks: Centering official actors in headlines (as opposed to including their claims in stories) allows their claims to gain legitimacy through circulation. For officials who have already caused harm or have taken evidently harmful positions in the past, headlining their views on the same causes harm to discourse. Their claims may fail one or more tests of validity and authenticity (discourse ethics): a) plain misleading by exaggeration b) taking numbers out of context c) not coming from a standpoint of lived experience or empirical knowledge.

Examples of such headlines: In 2020, President Trump said, “More white people are killed by police than Black people,” and this claim made it into the headlines of numerous news stories. Only a handful were careful not to elevate the claim as is. When the most powerful official in the land makes a claim like this, the pull of conventional/legacy newsworthiness determination is to elevate it to the headline. Headlining the story with this claim amplified the misleading framing, legitimized a false equivalence in proportionality of police killings, and added insult to injury to Black Americans. Yet, scores of newsrooms did just that. 

^{Screenshot from Google News showing media outlets and headlines. Photo by Subbu Vincent.}

More on Risks and Costs

The philosopher Jennifer Saul developed a concept called “fig leaf” to contrast with dog whistles in her latest book, Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood (2024). Saul offers this definition for what a falsehood fig leaf is: 

“A falsehood fig leaf is a bit of speech that blocks the inference (from something a person has said to the claim) that the person or utterance has violated our norm against untruthfulness."

- Jennifer Saul

This particular case of newsrooms reporting what Trump said on police killings verbatim is a case of editors giving a fig leaf to Trump's falsehood. She explains the problem of fig leaves for misleading claims and falsehoods further in her section on, “Reported Speech,” in the book. 

“People may feel very comfortable sharing reports of what others have said online, knowing that doing so is not an explicit endorsement. News organizations may find it appealing to report on ridiculous things that people have said—these can be a kind of clickbait—but doing so gives these claims greater prominence and keeps them in circulation. If news organizations can be induced to report on the ridiculous things that people have said, they may unwittingly become the accomplices of those who want to propel those ridiculous claims into mainstream discussions.”

- Jennifer Saul in Dog Whistles and Fig Leaves.

In a conversation with me via email, Saul says that the claim, "More white people are killed by police than Black people,” by itself would be recognised as misleading. But when the news headlines add, “Trump says, ‘More white people are killed by police than Black people,’" it starts sounding acceptable because now the overall sentence is reporting what Trump said, i.e, he did say that. “The fig leaf is the fact that they are just reporting what Trump said,” says Saul. 

“The repetition of this helps to spread belief in the misleading claim that more white people are killed by police than Black people,” she adds.

Mitigation: When covering such claims, diligent reporters would have talked to both domain experts and the impacted communities whose viewpoints may offer greater authenticity, and validity. Those views may pass the test for both responsible elevation of headlines and meeting newsworthiness. 

Examples of better headlining: For the same issue above, a few publications were more careful and mitigated the epistemic harm that emerges from such a claim (in being run as is), by adding context from reality into it. Two examples below are from USA Today and The Guardian. 

^{Screenshots from Google News showing captions from USA Today and The Guardian. Image by Subbu Vincent.}

Idea for a best practice: Look at the discourse the reporters have documented in the exchange of views, facts, and statistics in the story itself. Consider the views of people and communities who have less power than official actors. There will likely be newsworthy views, accurate readings of statistics, glimpses of democratic agency, and solution-seeking grounded in reality that meet the tests of validity and authenticity. Those might become candidates for elevation or synthesis into a headline. 

Does the headline simply restate a he-said-she-said spat between policy and partisan elites? Such headlines, especially on complex issues, are not expanding the power of vulnerable and solution-seeking communities to impact discourse. 

Risks: “Politics as usual” headlines are easy to frame because they run on ongoing controversies and ongoing controversialization of non-controversies. By non-controversies we mean undisputed facts, due process of law, etc. With “he-said-she-said” type spats in the headline, unimpacted or relatively insulated partisans may feel affirmed, but the opportunity to center and highlight democratic agency through the voices of groups seeking fair, proportionate and just remedies gets missed. Those voices are often downstream of elite political power. Comprehension (through discourse) and possibilities for solidarity building suffer. 

Mitigation: Serious issues being reported almost always have diverse stakeholders who occupy a range of vantage points from where action and speech are launched: Government decision makers, law enforcement personnel, regulators, impacted communities on the ground, non-profit organizations, retired officials, technical experts studying the issue, official record keepers or statisticians, conveners, trainers, and so forth. 

Take any complicated issue of our time: immigration, wages and jobs, housing, zoning, prices, poverty, public safety, disaster relief, taxation policy, health care, water quality, food safety, public health, environmental health, veterans affairs, etc. Accurate stories and narratives emerge regularly when reporters source diverse voices by identifying a broad range of stakeholders, identifying which groups and people have had the least amount of power in getting their voices heard and plan that into the reporting. These stories actually make it easier to decide on a headline. 

Reporters could ask the editor to center on the views or claims of the impacted groups who have explained what is going wrong or right, why and how the situation might be remedied or solutions expanded. Scanning voices, twists and turns in the story along an imaginary power line (official authorities and top C-suite execs are on one side and everyday people on the other), headline framers will be able to elevate voices of sourced-in stakeholders, already in the story, that are least powerful but most impacted.

Examples 

1. A great headline on stakeholders: In a story about DOGE firings at the National Park Service, North Dakota Monitor’s editors framed the headline around what knowledgeable people and stakeholders (retired park officers with years of service) were explaining: the likely real impact and costs of the firings: “that staff reductions and seasonal hiring chaos could affect visitors and imperil natural resources.” Former Yellowstone, Rushmore, Badlands superintendents say DOGE wiped out a generation of leaders
2. See this story: Elon Musk wants to 'delete' a federal agency designed to prevent another financial crisis and protect people from scams. Here the central actor’s intention posted on X, is being reported on in the story, but Business Insider’s reporters also explained what the stakes are here for the CFPB, and who has benefited from the watchdog. That reporting allows the headline to both show what Musk wants to do, and how the agency benefits vulnerable people.
3. Caveat: On the other hand, this principle will simply fail to catalyze your creativity for headlining if the story itself is a he-said-she-said spat, and does not include voices of the impacted or stakeholders. In this example–Australia rejects Elon Musk's claim that it plans to control access to the internet–Elon Musk makes a grand claim that Australia plans to control access to the Internet for its citizens, and three Australian officials countered that with their own accusations of Musk. But the real stakeholders were children and their access to social media, and parents. Because the story didn't complicate the narrative with their voices, the claim-counter-claim headline ends up “representing” the story. 

1. Listen to your audiences’ headline complaints: Not every newsroom has or can afford to have a public editor like NPR or PBS to pay attention to what your public stakeholders are saying. With fairly sophisticated LLM tools today, your engagement leads can collect all the feedback emails and reader comments into one bucket and prompt an LLM to find the headline complaints only in them, and categorize them with citations going to actual complaints. As a quick dipstick exercise, this will help show what your own audience has said and is saying to you. Remember that readers may not use formally normative language such as “representative integrity” or “Seeing through stakeholders’ eyes,” etc. Examine which of the principles above align best with what the readers are complaining about, and use them to revise the headline review process in your teams. 

2. Transparency: Review your current headlining approach and draft into an explanatory page on, “How we headline the stories you read,” and post it on your policy/about-us pages, with an embedded form for feedback/complaints on your headlines. 

3. Close the loop: Once you put a form on a page that explains your approach to headlining, monitor your audience's feedback submissions, weekly or biweekly. 

You are an editor and have final responsibility for the headline that goes out. You have a completed story draft on your screen, with a proposed headline. You are tempted to tweak it. Here’s a checklist:

1. Does the headline contradict or set up false expectations for the broad findings in the story?

=> Yes, drop it.

=> No, keep it on your shortlist. 

2. When the proposed headline has a quote or claim from a source: 

a. Is the content a false claim that has already been debunked before or has been debunked in the reporters’ story draft itself? 

=> If yes, drop the headline. 

b. Is there an utterance along with, or in the claim, that appears to be a fig leaf? 

=> If yes, review it carefully against the guidance in section 2 of this guide. 

=> If it is a fig leaf, drop the headline. 

Remember some false claims are lies, referring to intent to spread. The same standard applies. Lies are intentional because the false claim has been debunked already and the speaker has a track record of uttering it again and again and knows they are lies. 

In all these cases, nothing prevents the author from reporting on the false or misleading claims or lies using a truth-sandwich in the story itself. This is different from elevating it to the headline. 

3. Does the headline center the most powerful actors in the story, or the least? See how the reporter has accounted for coverage of downstream impacts and stakeholder diversity. There are often signals of sourcing stakeholdership in the reporting. 

=> You can use their viewpoints or claims (when found to be valid and authentic) to draft your headline. 

4. Reporters’ buy in. 

=> Send your draft headlines to the reporter(s). Get their inputs. The goal needs to be to trim down your list of headline choices from, say, three or four or five to just a few, but ethically valid ones. 

5. Get inputs from distribution specialists: 

As noted earlier, editors and analytics professionals worry that people will not open or click on a story simply because the headline did not land.

=> Send your final headlines shortlist to your SEO folks (could be web-producers), newsletter writers, and social media editors. This is where trending keywords, hashtags, etc. come in. Each of these distribution stakeholders are trying to get the story to a wider audience, and are going to want to bring their own agency into headlining too. 

SEO, for instance, is important because for an ongoing news cycle, it does drive traffic. Real people in your audience are searching using keywords and framings. That does not mean, however, the principles have to be necessarily compromised. Understanding the story’s diversity of stakeholder voices and narrative will help find intersections between inputs from distribution-side people and the ethics principles outlined above.