Hed, meet story

It's sort of a cardinal rule of headline writing. You can condense, you can highlight, you can frame, you can select, but you have to condense something that's actually in the text. You can't just make something up and use it to draw people into your story. That's called false advertising -- or, if you prefer, "lying."

And, as usual, we have a handy example from Fox, which uses the hed above ("Critics blast Obama's West Bank trip") to tease to this AP story:

JERUSALEM — Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama toured Israel’s Holocaust memorial Wednesday, laying a wreath in memory of the 6 million Jews who died and saying, “Ultimately, this is a place of hope.”

There's a little bit, beginning at the 11th graf, about Obama's West Bank visit, but nothing about any critics, or any blasting. (Perhaps Fox was thinking of the op-ed pages of the "liberal" "media," wherein the usual Krauthammer-Thomas choir is in full song). About as close as anyone comes is this:

But most Palestinians believe the U.S. is so irrevocably biased toward Israel that it will make little difference whether the next president is Democrat Obama or Republican John McCain, said pollster Jamil Rabbah. He offered no poll in support of that view.

Interesting bit of facticity from the AP there. Wonder why that was so important to point out?

Many people in Israel are concerned that Obama — a first-term U.S. senator with little foreign policy experience — would push Israel too hard in negotiations with the Palestinians.

And does AP have any polls to support that view? Or is some conventional wisdom just too wise to question?

You get the impression that the Israelis and the Palestinians have both been paying rather close attention to both the bold outlines and the nuances of what the candidates say about the Near East. It'd be nice if one could have that sort of confidence in AP campaign writers, wouldn't it?