Headlines

I've written a few thousand newspaper headlines over the years, and it's an art form. Tough to get the nub of a story in half a dozen words that are accurate, fair, and informative. My all-time favorite didn't even appear in print---it was tossed off by my wife Karen in the porch swing one night while we were discussing how we'd capsulize the birth of twin cubs to a famous panda. "That's easy," she said. "Ling-Ling Has Baby-Baby."

Alas, headlines in the current political season are neither as accurate nor as funny as that.

Some of my news these days comes from digests on the Web, and headline quality varies wildly. It's been especially hard for the writers to decide what to do with the Obama-Clinton clashes. This week, Obama answered some criticisms in a temperate manner, but the headline said "lashes out." As a headline writer, I feel verbs like "lash out" should be reserved for remarks that are angry, intemperate, and over the top. But Clinton has had her share of bad headlines, so maybe it all evens out.

The Web headline writers had a tough time after last night's Pennsylvania debate. The early headlines said something like "Candidates on defensive in tense debate." I had just watched the debate, and didn't see all that much defensiveness---and the debate was anything but tense. By the end of the evening, the writers had settled down to "Hillary: Obama Can Win." That was a fairly legitimate news angle, although hardly representive of the whole debate. But then neither was the 20-second "analysis" afterward by an ABC pundit---who apparently saw nothing in the debate but an attempt by Clinton to suggest that dire information would come out about Obama if he were the nominee.

Indeed, she did bring up Obama's service on a foundation board with one of the 1960s Weather People. To which Obama replied that he was eight years old when the Weathermen were active, and anyway Bill Clinton pardoned a couple of them during his presidency. (For me, the exchange at least clarified a recent headline on my supermarket tabloid: "Obama's Terrorist Friend!")

When he was a teenager in Hawaii, Obama sought advice now and then from an elderly black poet and family friend, Frank Marshall Davis, who may or may not have been a Communist in the 1930s. The headline writer for Accuracy in Media didn't hesitate a moment on that one: "Obama's Communist Mentor!" But with Accuracy in Media, we're in Fantasyland.

At the risk of becoming an editing gadfly of the New York Review of Books, I'll mention another curious headline, in its May 1 issue, where Anthony Lewis writes scathingly of the American use of torture in locations around the world, and concludes: "George W. Bush can seek his God's mercy for trying to legitimize torture by Americans. But here on earth he cannot escape judgment. For me he will always be the Torture President."

Strong words, from a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, long identified with the left end of U.S. politics.

What interests me is the headline on Lewis's piece: "The Terror President." That phrase doesn't appear in the text itself, so what happened? Did the NYRB feel that "The Torture President" was a little too far out for its headline? Probably not. My guess is that the headline writer was just dozing a little. After all, both words begin with T.