There was a recent story about a child dying in Victoria, Australia published in a newspaper. It's unfortunate when a child dies, or even when anyone dies, but that's not what is notable to talk about here. The issue is how they portrayed the death.
The title in the newspaper ran "Child lost to Covid-19". From reading this headline you would logically think that this child died from COVID-19. But to think that you would be wrong actually. And even the newspaper knew that this was wrong.
The even explicitly state in their last paragraph "however, it was revealed that coronavirus was not the reason for either his hospital admission or death."
You have to think, why would they even run a story with the previous headline. How can they call themselves a newspaper, or the author call themselves a journalist or whatever when they knowingly misrepresent what actually happened. How can they live with themselves for knowingly and purposefully publishing a false headline like that?
https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya/status/1463529322585550851
- DrJBhattacharya
They knew what they were saying was false in the headline, but they created that headline anyways. Why would anyone do such a thing? How can you live with yourself by doing such a thing? You're intentionally deceiving people.
How does this newspaper in this so-called journalist or reporter convince themselves that this is the right thing to do? It completely lacks honesty and journalistic integrity.
These type of headlines pray on people's unwillingness to actually read content and merely look at headlines for conclusions to what is going on.
This is the only time it's happened. All you have to do is look at some of the so-called fact checking. They make a claim that something is false. And anyone who reads the headline, will say something isn't true because a fact checker proved it to be not true.
But when you dig into the fact check, you often find a convoluted analysis were they introduce someone else's erroneous claim about something that did happen, and then proceed to debunk the erroneous claim someone made about what did happened as if they debunk what did happen, while still keeping the headline of what actually did happen as though it didn't happen and think that that's actually fact checking.
