Headline head-scratcher

It’s always about the headline, and headlines are hard. These things I know from nearly 50 years of writing articles for newspapers and a few years along the way writing headlines.

More often than not, readers refer to my columns by the phrases of their headlines, which I don’t write and which I’d sometimes, not frequently, write differently.

But if any news article is fair and detailed, as it should be, then a fewword summary for a headline will always fall short by simple definition—a headline being necessarily less-informing than a full text.

And if a column is as thoughtful and nuanced as it should be, the one-line header won’t begin to fully represent the pondering pundit’s full essence.

That’s the conundrum. The headline will almost always be less than the text, but the text will almost always be defined for readers by the headline.

That’s just the way it’s been since I first wrote a sports section headline for the old Arkansas Democrat in December of ’69.

“Warriors beat Rockets on late shot,” it might have said, it having been basketball season. But that would not have begun to capture the intense effort of young champions’ hearts for all those tense minutes before.

The legendary and still-great New York Times, without which we’d know maybe half of what we know about the current American president, boxed itself in Tuesday morning. It ordered up a one-line, 28-character, large-print headline on its lead article about President Trump’s statement Monday from the White House on the weekend mass shootings.

I defy anyone—including the best headline-writer in any newsroom—to use 28 letters and spaces to capture what Trump said.

The man is bellicose, contradictory and alienating by nature, even in a prepared statement. He professed to lament racism and to want to fight it with unity. But he blamed everything but racism for what was, in El Paso for sure, racially motivated human slaughter.

Trump took no blame for his own incendiary rhetoric that has exploited racial division. He blamed mental illness and video games and, of course, the media. He uttered nary a word on any new gun-law proposal.

So there you have it. Now give me a banner headline on all that using 28 spaces, a space for these oversimplified purposes being either a letter, punctuation or the gap between words.

I will now relate the first-edition headline atop the right corner of the front page of The Times on Tuesday. Then I’ll tell you that the headline would have gone unremarked-upon for any preceding American president. Then I will tell you that, in this instance, it all hit the fan, to the extent that The Times changed the headline for the second edition and formally apologized the next day for having blown it the first time.

“Trump urges unity vs. racism.” That was the offending headline.

It is the kind of bland headline based on banal presidential assertions that we’ve all passed over routinely in newspapers for decades. It’s accurate unless you interject judgment, seeking not just fact but truth—there being a difference.

My only problem with the headline is that I no longer believe it is appropriate to accept as accurate anything Trump says. I believe it to be accurate in his case to write that he “said” he wanted unity against racism, not to assume that he, in truth, “urged” it.

All he really ever genuinely urges that I can detect is that people accept his magnificence.

But that was the least of it on Twitter for liberals, Democrats, journalism professors and even Times staffers, many of whom posted to allege journalistic malpractice in that the headline gave Trump credit for urging a nice-sounding goal that blatantly contradicted his own pattern of behavior and misrepresented what had, in fact, been the short-shrift he gave race in his statement.

For the second edition, Times editors killed the headline and went with, “Assailing hate but not guns.”

I’m not sure that was a lot better. I think I’d have gone with “Trump says stuff, people mad,” in which case I’d have been on the bus back to Little Rock.

The point is that the original phrasing was an everyday headline—whether right, wrong or indifferent—except in the context of this deeply troubled time regarding this deeply troubling creature of a president.

People are keyed up as they’ve never been before.

For example, Alexandria OcasioCortez tweeted that the headline demonstrated that white supremacy is aided by the cowardice of mainstream institutions.

That’s a little much to lay on a 28-character dud of a headline delivered by underpaid and deadline-stressed copy editors.

Meantime, what might be the best headline for this column? I’m thinking: “Columnist writes stuff, people mad.”

That could be what we call a standing head.