Badger Blog Alliance

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Getting the headline right

This is weird. Here's the lead paragraph of a story over at JSOnline:

Wisconsin's rural counties have some of the highest rates of uninsured people in the state, according to new data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Now here's the headline:

Wisconsin has third-lowest rate of uninsured residents in U.S.
Notice the difference? The headline took the best news out of the story, while the lead focused on the worst news. It's a little inverse bias – usually, we expect the reporters and copy editors to focus solely on the bad news out of a story like this.