Argot Navis

Having pretended to be a journalist for a year, I know that headlines are hard to write. I don't, however, think this is an excuse for writing bad headlines. The most enjoyable of the bad headlines are, of course, the ones which (sometimes) unintentionally contain a bad pun. I'd add to this category the perfectly good BBC news stories which use actual quotes in their headlines. I'm pretty sure these are generally not meant as scare quotes, but the effect really becomes more hilarious when someone sneaks a pun in there.

The really bad headlines, though, aren't the unintentionally hilarious ones, but the ones which are just misleading. Generally, it is considered good form in any discipline to have a title which accurately reflects the content of the work. For instance, it would probably be bad form to call your paper on particle physics, “Disillusionment in American Modernist Literature.” Of course, titles clearly unrelated to the work they're supposed to describe would be caught and changed. Unless, of course, it was intentional. The ones that actually do slip by, then, are usually pretty much right, but a little fuzzy on the details.

One in particular caught my eye tonight. The headline, in itself, isn't bad, except for the fact that there's nothing in the article to suggest that the assertion made in the headline is correct. Really, the scientists they quote (including one who is apparently a generic “scientist” at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee) seem to be doing an adequate job of explaining that the algae outbreak is a result of phosphorus and invasive mussels — although, of course, more research is needed to determine the amount of influence each factor has. They don't have a solution yet, but I'd hardly equate that to an inability to explain the outbreak. I have a sneaking suspicion that whoever wrote this headline read the first two or three paragraphs, skipped over some of the rest and then figured that nobody would read an article about algae and wrote that headline just to add some drama to it. Or maybe I'm wrong and, despite the explanations they give in the article, scientists are simply unable to explain this.