Not Exactly As Advertised
As a self-confessed media weasel (my affectionate, hopefully mildly funny term for me and my ilk!) I’ll admit to not being even a little bit objective about what goes on with other media. I’ve worked in them all and I’ve seen behind the curtain, so to speak.
But I am extremely irked by misleading headlines! We create headlines here at 680 News, of course, but I try my very best not to inflame what I write in a bid to be more flashy or interesting – unless I do it in a cartoonish manner over a humourous story. The news is what it is, in my opinion, and it doesn’t need a revision of the facts to make it sound sexier or more dramatic. That’s my view.
So it makes me a little bit buggy when I read a newspaper headline that ends up having little or nothing to do with the actual story. It happens quite regularly! And this past weekend it happened in a New York papers concerning the death of actor Heath Ledger.
“THE BODY WAS STILL WARM”, it screamed out. This particular tabloid style paper is making Ledger’s death the pantleg on which it has trained its attack dog teeth. Police have decided not to question Mary Kate Olsen, who got the first few calls from Ledger’s panicked masseuse after she found his body, but this paper is skewering the young actress for not making a statement about it.
On Sunday, the “warm” headline was meant to give the impression that Ledger may have died later than first reported, meaning that a call to 911 instead of a flurry of calls to Olsen, might have resulted in paramedics arriving earlier and saving the 28 year old’s life. But if you actually read the story, which I did, you find that the “warm” comment came in the midst of several other sentences written down by attending paramedics, that make it clear the actor had already been dead for some time and was beyond reviving. There was no question about that. The headline was taken from an insignificant line that had said, “torso warm to touch”.
A promising and talented young actor is dead. I enjoyed his work and his name on the credit list was enough to convince me to watch a movie. But toxicology results are still pending. Prescription drugs were found near him. No one suspects murder so it’s not as if some crazed killer is on the loose. There is just no need to try to boost this already tragic story, planting hype where no hype should be. I like to get my information as directly and honestly as possible and I like to give it the same way.
