Politics

A Lapdog Media Tactic: Pushing An Agenda With Misleading Headlines

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We’ve all done it – we see a juicy headline and we’re outraged! But instead of clicking the link for more information, we file away the info to be used later against our political opponents. These days, if you’re a news junkie and twitter addict the way I am, it’s much too easy to do.

And that’s why media lapdogs take advantage of it with a very simple tactic that’s used every day – the misleading headline.

What they do is put just enough info in the headline to get a reaction – it doesn’t even need to be a lie, just not the entire truth. Some will click on the twitter link and read more – many won’t. This is a perfect example:

Notice how he isn’t identified as a liberal until you read past the headline – so the headline just registers in liberals’ lizard-sized brains as some conservative Fox News host, and feeds their belief that the Republican Party is waging a “war on women.”

Every tweet with the headline gets read, but not all gets clicked on, so that they can see his identification as a liberal.

UPDATE:

The good and decent folks at Twitchy went after the writer of the post for this, and he tries to sidestep the issue. Read about it here.

Now one step removed from this – Huffington Post:

This one’s even more brilliant – the headline doesn’t mention Fox News, but the article does. What the article neglects to mention anywhere is that Beckel is a liberal!

So it leads to brilliant comments like this one from their mouth-foaming dim-witted readers:

So through the manipulation of headlines, and the ignorance and intellectual laziness of the common reader, an agenda is propagated and the truth is subverted.

UPDATE:

Another venue people often overlooked is Yahoo News – they have an enormous ability to reach people because so many millions check their email on their platform and see their headlines, which have a leftist tinge.

This is how they covered the Beckel controversy:

This kinda skirts the issue – associating Fox News with a controversial “rape remark.” But here’s the rub: they don’t identify Beckel as a liberal in the entire article.

And to add more bias, they include the smear that the hashtag I created was about “rape jokes”, when it absolutely wasn’t:

Salazar’s comments drew the ire of conservatives, comparisons to failed Senate candidate Todd Akin and the mocking #LiberalTips2AvoidRape hashtag on Twitter. (The hashtag itself sparked a backlash among those who found its rape jokes offensive.)

Just masterful… and most of the idiot listeners of Yahoo won’t ever know what’s actually true.
UPDATE:

Some tweets from people who don’t read, just read headlines, and are fooled by this tactic: