Today in hedge deletion

Making stuff up isn't the only way Fox News constructs the world for its followers. Many of Fox's strategies, indeed, mimic the rules of news -- closely enough that the resulting product is hard to tell from the real thing. Here's one from Oct. 28 illustrating how hedge deletion works.

This won't be news to those of you who have written more than a few headlines in your working lives, but headlines are shorter than stories. Things get left out or shortened or worked-around in the eternal battle to catch the audience's eye (or provoke a click), maintain the most (and the most necessary) precision, and fit the space you're given. That's how the Soviet Union became "RUSS" in the thundering broadsheet headlines of the 1940s: If "Afghanistan" wouldn't fit in one column yesterday, what makes you think it'll fit in one column today?

Many of the principles are so widely understood as to go unnoticed: when articles and linking verbs can go, when a colon can attach a speaker to an idea, and so on. Qualifiers and attributions are trickier. Sure, you can leave the "forecasters say" off "Beautiful day in store," but let's be a bit less footloose on "Mayor embezzles millions." And take a lesson from the sports pages before you delete the hedge in "almost pulled off a startling upset."

So -- speaking of compelling the audience to click through -- what to make of a homepage headline like "Harris supporter screams in toddler's face in front of shocked dad at rally"?* For one thing, the audience hates being let down. Here's the headline on the story itself:

Apparent Harris rallygoer screams at baby in stroller in shocking viral video

Oh. Well, let's see how well that's held up by the lede:

A video of a woman screaming at a toddler outside of Vice President Kamala Harris' celebrity-packed Houston rally is going viral on social media as critics slam the shocking behavior seen toward a child.

Harris' Texas rally Friday was joined by celebrities such as Beyoncé, Jessica Alba and Willie Nelson to make a last-ditch appeal to voters in the red state ahead of next week's election.

Enough background. Ready for some hedges and attribution?

A video posted to social media shortly after the event shows a woman in a light blue T-shirt standing outside what appears to be the Houston Metro station walking over to a little girl in a stroller among the throngs of people decked out in Harris-Walz apparel.

The woman in the light blue shirt is seen leaning down to the toddler in the stroller and screaming in her face. It is unclear what the woman said and what provoked the incident.

Or, beyond the T-shirt, what Fox thinks she might have been doing there. But onward:

A man, likely the young girl's father, quickly picked up the toddler and removed her from the woman's direct line of ire.

The shocking video then shows another woman quickly confronting the screaming woman, pulling her away from the girl and admonishing her for the outburst.

... The girl's father was holding a microphone during the exchange and was later heard asking the screaming woman: "Are you not ashamed at all? Look at her face!" It is unclear if the father was a counter-protester at the rally or why he had a microphone.

If you hadn't already known, "it is unclear" is journalese for "we don't know" (as in, "It is unclear what protests he might have been counterprotesting"). But the story has to be important, because viral:

The video has racked up more than 22 million views on X alone as of Monday morning.

Social media commenters lambasted the screaming woman, while praising the other woman who intervened.

"Social media commenters" are the rough equivalent of the old "man on the street" -- meaning, among other things, that there's always the chance they are chosen because they look like the sort of people who will give the right answer. ("Unhinged Democrat," for example.) When Twitter handles include terms like "CornPop" or "Brandon," you may draw some conclusions about the partisan alignment of the users.

It's possible, of course, that all the conclusions Fox leapt to are perfectly true. The woman might be a Harris supporter, the scene might have been at the alleged transit stop in question, the guy with the microphone might even be the dad. (It's hardly Fox's fault that nobody knows what a guy in an unsourced video is doing with a microphone -- though it seems worth noting that the story required the efforts of two reporters.)  But you can also conclude, as with "Beautiful day in store," that you know all you need for the day's intellectual labor from the homepage.

* No. 6 story at around 4:15 p.m. Eastern US, if you're scoring along at home.