Separated by a common headline

Two questions:

1) What's your first-glance reading of what the headline means?
2) Where are you from? (Specifically, where did you learn to read headlines?)

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Now let's not always see the same hands

It seems like we just went over this last week, but:

1) Tune TV to CNN
2) Sit in front of TV

Does that cover it? I don't want to have to put this on the final.

'Caught up in the moment'

It would have been nice to get through the summer without a polling rant, but -- OK, here's Nate Silver, stating the obvious:

We’ve documented for years how polls tend to rise and fall — in what are often fairly predictable patterns — after events like debates and conventions. In general, what suddenly goes up in polls tends to gradually come back down after a matter of a few weeks. Conventions typically produce polling swings of 4 to 6 percentage points toward the party that just nominated its candidate, for instance — but the polls usually revert back to about where they were before after a few weeks.

True, though surveywise it's not nearly as interesting as the "rally 'round the flag" effect. But stay tuned; conventional wisdom usually travels in flocks:

It looks as though something like this is happening again following the first Democratic debate last month. If you look at the RealClearPolitics average:

• Biden has rebounded to 28.4 percentage points from a low of 26.0 percentage points just after the debate. He was at 32.1 percent before the debate, so he’s regained about two-fifths of what he lost.
•  Harris has fallen to 12.2 percentage points from a peak of 15.2 percentage points. She was at 7.0 percent before the debate, so she’s lost about a third of what she’d gained.

Harris is still in better shape than she was before the debates, but she’s currently 16 points behind Biden instead of looking like she’s on the verge of overtaking him.

Which is the setup for this:

I’ll be honest … as predictable as this pattern is, it’s easy even for professionals like me to get caught up in the moment, especially in the early stages of a race before we’re using any sort of model to smooth the data out.

With (ahem) appropriate respect -- no, it isn't. That's one of the things that separate professionals from pundits. Medical professionals don't seem to have any trouble telling female patients not to waste time steaming their ladyparts with eucalyptus leaves, because part of the professional's job is distinguishing quackery from evidence. If you can't avoid getting "caught up in the moment," that's an argument against your claim to professionalism.

If a candidate rapidly goes from 7 to 15 in the polls, our unconscious, System 1 reflex is to assume the trend will continue, and that the candidate will continue gaining ground — to 20 points, 25 points and beyond. More often than not, though, the candidate loses ground after a sharp rise.

Unless we're claiming to be a professional psychologist or something, also no. We have no idea what "our" "unconscious" reflexive response to a perceived short-term rise in poorly aggregated survey data would be, because all we know about short-term responses to poorly aggregated survey data is what hucksters tell us. If professionals did their jobs, we wouldn't obsess about how people responded to headlines like zOMG RCP AVERAGE FALLS 3 POINTS ELECTION OVER!!11!11!1!1!!11!!!!, because they wouldn't occur in grownup publications. Yes, we'd still have to worry about the clueless and the openly fake, but that's why we have professionals: to spread the word as often as possible when bullshit needs to be countered.

This is a polling rant, but I'd like to think the point goes farther. The top-of-the-hour lead (most closely following a traffic report; make of that what you will) was about whether the "conventional wisdom" about Robert Mueller's congressional appearances this week had been borne out. Ladles and jellyspoons, those who want the conventional wisdom can find it anywhere; if you want to add some market value, could I suggest you start by providing unexcited news with frequent reminders that the null hypothesis can't be rejected based on the day's developments. 

Journalistic expertise is a fraught thing. Sad to say, one of the things we're best at is making data converge into story lines -- like the "game frame" that assumes, as above, that opening a lead in the first half points to opening a bigger lead in the second. That has the advantage of making stuff comprehensible (for many) and accessible (for many), and it's delivered a lot of actionable information about political, economic and cultural matters through the years. It also means we're traditionally not very good at telling stories that aren't interesting (like most survey results), even if they're likely to be more informative. We still have some time to work on that, and the week's events suggest that it would be nice to start sooner rather than later.

Stop it with 'sound bites'

You almost hate to say it, given how well the AP has done over the past few years at calling out lies and bullshit without turning the process into a production number, but -- cut it out, you guys. Look. There are plenty of people who seem to think the point of a congressional hearing is "crisp sound bites." Your job is to ignore those people and deliver the mail. If the sound bites on offer didn't spell things out unambiguously enough for you, let me suggest you ignore the "crisp" ones and concentrate on the unambiguous ones.

Today in pro tips

Let's see ...

1) Sit in front of TV
2) Turn on TV

Does that more or less cover it?

Break out the clue bat

A few observations on headlines:
1) When in doubt, use the grownup word
2) If you think your audience understands your shorthand, think again
3) Especially if you want the shorthand to mean two different things in adjacent heds

I'd almost rather have "solons" than "reps" in the centerpiece,* but there's an easy fix for that. Since the column decides to address them directly, the hed can too, so you can drop the auxiliary and at least get "GOP lawmakers:" into the top line. You'd have to capitalize the "C" beginning the second line, but there still might be room to squeeze in the missing preposition "to." It's still hard to tell whether the elephant is coming or going -- and, again, if you're betting on your audience to get Elephant = Republican on the first go from a Photoshop,** you should probably go get some more chips now -- but we almost have a usable hed.


As opposed to the one in the left-hand column, which should just be discarded. I'd be happy if headline writers discarded "Dem" altogether (see above under "grownup word"), but "Rep" is right out for "Republican," especially when it's cuing something else on the same page.

And neither one is necessary. Nothing in the column -- which is about the local constabulary playing fast and loose with individual privacy and why that's an especially bad idea here -- holds up the hands-across-the-water bit that the hed writer chose to emphasize. Oddly, the online hed is reasonably sensible:

... and that's where the print hed should steer.

There's not a lot to say for the Sunday opinion section in general, though at least all of Mitch Albom's energy seems to have been directed elsewhere. Maybe we could start by not annoying the readers who've managed to make it this far into the paper.

* Yes, it's that bad.
** I'll acknowledge that cartoons work differently, because that's kind of the point.

Somewhere there's heaven

All together now: When our crater-ridden neighbor hits your eye like an iconic four-square Detroit-style pie, that's some writering. (That's some writering.)

I'm still trying to figure out how the horizon got to be above the Space Center, but that's probably a good place to stop.

No, you can't use the average

When we tell you young sprouts that you should never write puns as headlines, it isn't because we want to crush your souls. OK, it isn't just because we want to crush your souls; the larger reason is that you should never write puns in headlines unless you are very, very good at it,* and on the off chance you are, whatever story you're hedding probably doesn't lend itself to the pun treatment anyway. 

Should you think all the soul-crushing is worth the candle, though, several things must ye do. One, make sure the pun works literally as well as figuratively. The headline is still supposed to deliver the mail, after all, and if cleverness gets in the way of telling your audience what went on, best to omit the cleverness.** Two, it's a headline, so any of the facts it sets forth need to be clear -- not just implied -- in the text. So if you've bet your immortal soul on "Fast four-ward" in the hammer and reminded us in the deck to expect "a quartet of reasons to care," you probably shouldn't start by offering three reasons to care:

• The Tigers play baseball
• Baseball is fun
• In January, you'll wish you could watch the Tigers and the Royals!

That's as may be. I suppose the job of the columnist is to stir up all the people who will have their hands full with basketball and hockey by then, but it's still only one reason, for a total of three.

OK, it's sports, and nobody said there would be math. But proceed to the jump:

No, that's five reasons. (You can tell, because it says "Here are five reasons.") You can't take the average of three on the front and five on the jump and call it a four-peat "fast four-ward." That's not how measures of central tendency work.

Are there more important things to worry about? There are certainly more important topics to worry about (and if you're expecting major regional papers to have the sort of alarm-bell effect about crises that they might have had two decades ago, you are in for a long wait). But that doesn't mean there's no relationship among the skills involved. Editors are the quiet kids at the end of the row who look at their own scorecards to check when the announcer makes some proclamation. With some care and feeding, they grow up into the quiet kids who check their own scorecards at news conferences when the secretary of state is describing the latest outrage from Iran. That still doesn't mean they get to do puns in headlines, but it might give a sense of purpose to the otherwise routine soul-crushing.

* Sort of like your NBA career. If you were that good, we probably would have noticed by now.
** But come hear the paper in Toronto next month that tells you why this maxim is slipping from our grasp as well.

That unheated cattle train to Siberia

What does it take for the Fear 'n' Balanced Network to refer to its oracle's pronouncements as an "over-the-top tirade" in the No. 3 spot on the homepage? But wait, there's more!

 Yes, you heard right: Not just a "bizarre tirade" but a "bizarre Twitter rant":

President Trump teed off on the news media in a bizarre Twitter rant Thursday morning ahead of a big social media summit at the White House slated for later in the day.

The string of tweets attacked the news media and claimed the industry would go out of business when he leaves office, even suggesting outlets would be forced to endorse him this cycle for the sake of their own survival.

He went on to alternately praise himself, lob insults at familiar targets in the 2020 Democratic field and even joke about serving more than two terms.

Pause for a moment and think of the human cost. That's one name in the byline and two in the shirttail who could find themselves with first-class reservations on that unheated cattle train to Siberia before the "social media summit" is out!

Betcha can't eat just one

Nobody can resist a chunk of Elongated Yellow Fruit! Though you'd like to think that anyone who'd include "butt-shifted" in the report could have added the preferred additional modifier: "clutch-challenged ursine invader." And you have to appreciate the Boulder County cops for remembering that when perps exit the vehicle, it's always "in an unknown direction."

Thanks as always to the Bremner Center for the Popular Orange Vegetable.

The detainee of Zenda

Dear CNN: Given that your own coverage from earlier in the day referred to the prisoner as a "prisoner," is there some particular reason you thought "detainee" was the appropriate term for a hed on the verdict? That's some Fox-level pandering:

 ... though even Fox manages to call him a "prisoner" today. (Fox does get some sort of prize for using "detainee" in the lede of one trial story while quoting a witness as saying "prisoner" in the second graf.)

If you retain some fear from the second Bush presidency that "prisoner" had some specific meaning that ruled out those captured on the battlefield, or those held behind barbed wire in what you describe as a "prison yard":

... it's time to get over it.

In today's story, there would have been nothing wrong with "captive." Or "ISIS fighter." Or "captive ISIS fighter." Any of them could alternate with, or substitute for, "prisoner" with no risk of Elongated Yellow Fruit syndrome. But "detainee" should have been out of bounds in 2001, and it's far out of bounds now.