When I was studying journalism in college, some of the professors would bring out terrible headlines as a minute or two of us laughing a bit and taking the seriousness off of everything that we do a bit. It turned into a hobby of mine and now it is something that I do all the time. It was a lot more fun back when you could collect a paper copy of these things and there were vast Reddit communities that would circulate the bad headlines from all over the world.
It has lost a lot of its "edge" in recent times because there is nothing terribly special about coming across a webpage that everyone on earth can access. It was also a much more serious blunder on the part of the publisher because chances are there were already thousands or hundreds of thousands of physical copies of these terrible headlines already in circulation and its not like they can recall all of them is there?
Here's some of the winners that I have from over the years.
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I can't even imagine what the blowback of this was. The entire idea behind witness protection is to keep their identity a secret. I don't think that you need to be terribly smart to understand that. I don't know the details of this specific article other than the fact that it is real.
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IN 1999 we were fast approaching the death of almost all paper versions of newspapers and staff were already cut back to the point of oblivion and well, it kind of shows. I certainly hope that teenagers aren't getting pregnant as often once they hit their mid-20's.
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I think the average person gets what the real message here is just by the headline but man, that is so funny to me. We thought this would kill of them but it didn't work. What do we do now?
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I don't know who Lucy Parkinson is but I wish I did. Apparently this was not a joke but a serious article warning about the dangers of nuclear power plants. Lucy, an apparent environmental activist of sorts, shows her lack of overall intelligence with that headline, that is for sure.
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I've see a LOT of these over the years and am familiar with how and why it can happen. All of the various programs that are meant to help facilitate the easy production of pages that are a pretty unique size (the size of a newspaper, you don't want photos at the crease and would prefer if stories continue on only one side, for example.) In these programs they don't have any idea what you are going to be writing about so they put placeholders there for editors and writers to have an idea what the layout is going to look like before they even put information in there. Obviously, you are supposed to change this out before you print it but hundreds of times throughout the years it actually went to print before anyone noticed that there wasn't actually any headling.
Now back in the day if you had an editorial board that clearly didn't even read the paper that they are meant to be in charge of, well they would all get fired. I would have gotten fired and I wasn't even being paid.
This is all funny and what not but I fear, actually I know, that the forces we are dealing with today in the media are far more dangerous than some people letting some headlines sneak past the editors that don't make sense. Instead, the news we have today is intentionally misleading in an effort to warp public opinion in a certain direction. These organizations also apparently but not provably, have an army of people that infiltrate social media in order to make fake news truth by virtue of it being widespread. If enough people repeat a lie it becomes truth is how the old saying goes and these days I feel that news outlets are doing this on purpose. When was the last time you saw a right-leaning publish bad information about a conservative that was still in good graces? When in the past 4 years (until just recently) would any major left-leaning publication ever post anything negative about Biden even though there was plenty of material there?
Not very often, if ever. The news is no longer the news and the longer you or anyone else you know spends time being dedicated to any particular source, the more entrenched in the brainwashing they are going to be. I'm not picking sides here: I dislike the conservative media as much as I dislike the liberal media. They are all full of shit and have zero interest in informing their audiences.
The next time you get all worked up about something you see in the "news," I would suggest you try to find an article written by a source you know to be partisan on the other side of your personal beliefs and see what they have to say about it. Same people, same dates, same location, same information... but completely different conclusions. Funny how that works huh?
