Friday, July 13, 2012

Headlines are fun sometimes

Earlier this week, Mitt Romney spoke to the NAACP.  (He's running for president, by the way.)  I read a few articles about the event because this time of year is slow for news.  I don't mean to minimize the relevance of the NAACP, but I have read this story before.  Well, that's not entirely true; I have never read one where the sitting President of the United States was a member of the class for which the NAACP was founded to help.

Now, when I read this headline on Townhall.com, I was surprised: Romney Receives Standing Ovation for Straight Talk at NAACP Convention.  Townhall is, admittedly a conservative website trying to spin a conservative angle.  Now, compare to a Slate.com headline: Romney Booed at NAACP Appearance for Promising Obamacare Repeal and Huffpo.com: Mitt Romney Booed At NAACP Convention For Saying He'd Repeal Obamacare.  Neither of those sites are particularly sympathetic to Romney.

The contents of each piece are a bit different, too, with Townhall going into the most detail and making it sound like he's going to peel away a third of black voters, even though polling suggests he has 6 percent of support among that group (according to the Slate article).

This is an interesting case, because Slate and Huffpo are really "Dog Bites Man" stories, so they're not really that newsy in the first place.  Townhall comes off as that weird place where emphasizing facts in a particular way comes off as bias -- kind of like moving what should be an A6 story to the front page.  Townhall was the only one to mention standing ovation at the end (and buried it, so it was probably a zealous editor writing that headline) and Huffpo did mention the politeness of the crowd.  The Slate story only talks about the boos surrounding Obamacare.

Each outlet did publish other stories, but these were the first to come up after the event, the sort of first impressions.  I found it quite interesting that each chased the angle they wanted in the first run by the editorial staffs.

What does this mean?  I think that the headline, the newsy part is that Romney spoke before the NAACP, because that is not always something Republicans do.  The fact that he would be facing a hostile crowd is not hard-hitting journalism and trying to paint as rosy a picture as Townhall does is really nothing short of spinning for your guy.  Both really strike me as sorts of hackery.

I think that if you read all three, you can come away with a reasonable picture of the story -- the NAACP was a polite but partisan crowd hearing a speech from a presidential candidate maybe 2% of the attendees would vote for.  And quite frankly, the more interesting story coming out of the NAACP Convention is that Obama did not speak at the convention this week, the summer before his re-election to president when he needs to have the NAACP's constituency as energized as possible to win.  (Here is a Townhall.com link about it and a Huffpo.com link about it -- oddly enough, I could not find a Slate.com one telling that same story.)

I guess the moral of the story is to take your news with some skepticism, even for benign, trivial stories, and seek out sources from different perspectives.  The aggregate of these small stories matter in shaping the political and social narrative by reinforcing expectations (Huffpo and Slate) or really making the outlook seem rosier than it might actually be for Romney (Townhall).

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