more bad headline writing

I’m seeing more and more very poorly written news headlines lately. Here’s a bad one from a CNN story today:

“Pirates seize oil tanker off Horn of Africa”

Upon reading this, my first thought was: “What kind of a fool steers an oil tanker off the Horn of Africa these days?”

But the exact location was actually as follows:

“Two pirate skiffs attacked the Kuwaiti-owned MV ZIRKU about 250 nautical miles southeast of the Omani port city of Salalah, in the eastern part of the Gulf of Aden, the European Union Naval Force Somalia said in a statement.”

A more accurate headline would have been something like: “Pirates seize oil tanker far from Somali coast.”

A good rule of thumb is that the headline of a story should presage the primary reaction you’re going to have to the story. I think the primary reaction most people would have to this story, is: “Man, those pirates are operating pretty far to the east now!” But the phrase “off Horn of Africa” has the opposite effect, and suggests pirate business as usual. (Yes, I realize the pirates have already made some attacks even further to the east than this one, but the eastward creep of their operations still remains somewhat surprising.)

The NY Times also had a weak headline yesterday. It’s no longer up, but it was the one that said something like “Libyan Rebel Gains May Be Transitory, U.S. Warns”. While literally true, it was still a misleading headline. It suggests a lack of U.S. commitment to the rebels, when in fact the whole point of the statement turned out to be the exact opposite of that. The flavor of the story was more like “the rebel gains may be transitory unless we help them even more.” In other words, it was an interventionist story with a non-interventionist headline. Sloppy work.