Thursday, December 20, 2007

Muslims Chant "Death to America! Death to Israel!" at Hajj Part 2

The previous post uses an Associated Press (AP) news story as its source.

Quite a few new outlets use the AP. A few might run an entire AP story, but in most cases, a news outlet chooses a its own headline, and edits the AP copy. For instance, headlines for the AP Hajj story included: I've written about headlines before. This time, I'll try to be brief.

I made up that "Muslims Chant 'Death to America! Death to Israel!' at Hajj" headline to
  1. Grab attention
  2. Show how a headline can be strictly accurate, but intentionally deceptive
The headline is 'accurate' - there were Muslims chanting "Death to America!" and "Death to Israel!" at Hajj. But the headline gives a very biased impression. About 1 in every 10,000 Muslims engaged in Hajj this year were at the Iranian rally.

So, as I've written before and will probably write again, When reading the news, read the news, not just the headlines - and think about what you're reading.

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