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The Weekend Hangover
A headline has one job, and it is not accuracy. It is to make you stop scrolling. We take one apart word by word and read what the story underneath it actually said.
What we covered
- The difference between what a reporter wrote and what an editor put on top of it
- Passive voice as a way to move blame off a page
- Why a question mark at the end of a headline usually means nobody could confirm it
- How to read a story from the bottom up, where the caveats live
Chapters
- 0:00 Cold open
- 3:40 The headline, out loud
- 14:05 Who actually writes these
- 27:30 Reading it from the bottom up
- 41:15 What we would have run instead
- 1:22:00 What is coming Wednesday
Corrections
Nothing has been corrected on this episode. If you think something here is wrong, send the timestamp and what you believe is wrong to the corrections desk and it gets an answer.
Transcript
Open to everyone, always. Press a timestamp to move the player to that moment.
SelenaSomebody read a headline this morning and thinks they know what happened.
DwightAnd they might. The headline might be right. It is just not the thing that was reported.
SelenaThat is the whole show. The story after the headline.
SelenaHere is the one we picked apart this week. Read it out loud and listen to what it does not say.
DwightThere is no person in that sentence. Something happened to somebody. Nobody did it.
SelenaPassive voice is not a grammar problem. It is a decision about who is in the frame.
DwightThe reporter did not write that headline. In most newsrooms the reporter never sees it before it runs.
SelenaAn editor writes it, and the editor is answering a different question. Not what is true, but what makes somebody stop scrolling.
DwightWhich is why the headline and the story so often disagree with each other.
SelenaAnd why a question mark at the end usually means nobody could confirm it.
DwightSo read it from the bottom up. The last four paragraphs are where the caveats live.
SelenaEvery qualification that would slow the top of the story down gets moved to the bottom where fewer people finish.
DwightThat is not a conspiracy. It is how the form works. But you can read against it once you know.
SelenaWhat would we have run instead. Something longer and worse for traffic.
DwightWhich is the honest answer, and it is also why this show exists.
SelenaWednesday we open the phones. Put your take in the queue and we read it out by name.
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