Horribly Written Headlines About Horrible Things

It will be difficult, in some cases, to explain simply and clearly what fresh hell the new Trump administration is attempting to unleash. There will be stories that require some explanation, whether because of the complex (il)legalities behind them or the nonsense way the absolutely cooked brains in charge attempt to disseminate them. The richest man in the world giving a Nazi salute on stage at the inauguration is not such a story.

And yet, the Paper of Record: “Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture.”

This is one of the worst headlines ever written. It is misleading in its basic facts — whose hand gesture? Is Musk mad about the hand gesture, or did he make it? It misplaces the actual story from the action — the performance of the “hand gesture” in question — to the reaction to it — “speculation” has been “ignited,” indicating that this discussion surrounding the gesture is in fact the more important issue at hand, not to mention that such discussion has been relegated to the vaguely derogatory “online” space.

Worst of all, it does not tell the reader what happened: what hand gesture? What hand gesture could possibly have not only “ignited online speculation” but also resulted in this story, with this awful fucking headline, at one point plastered at the top of the New York Times homepage? What in god’s name happened here?

Of course, a reader could continue on into the story to get some details; one would have to get four paragraphs in, however, before reading a description of the action, and one further before hearing that some out there likened the gesture to the obvious thing that it was. But more to the point, it is well understood that in this era, people often do not read past the headline; they see it on one social media site or another and scroll past to the next abomination, and while there was certainly plenty of “online speculation” available to us all on this particular topic, one would hope that the major media outlets tasked with chronicling this complicated era and informing the public of the basic facts as they occur might be aware of that as well.

There were, of course, plenty of headlines generated on the first day of the Trump administration; some are going to be difficult to unpack, and many will slip past an average news consumer thanks to the sheer firehose nature of it all. The least we can hope for, in that environment, is that our theoretically most trusted sources don’t package the simplest atrocities in nonsensical bubble wrap.