Virginian Pilot: Lying in the Headline

The headline read: Lawmaker questions the effectiveness of spy program. The Pilot did a cut-and-paste on an AP story. It isn’t until you get to paragraph three that the real story is told: the disclosure of the program’s existence in December in the NY Times (and the Virginian Pilot and virtually every other newspaper in the country) has undermined it s effectiveness. Peter Hoekstra, House Intelligence Committee Chairman said:

"It's been across the media for the last 50 days. Does anyone really believe that, after 50 days of having this program on the front page of our newspapers, across talk shows across America, that al-Qaida has not changed the way that it communicates?"

The story really is that the American press has rendered an important weapon in the fight against terrorism less effective. The reality is that the comments by Hoekstra are an indictment of the press.

But if you are the headline writer in the Virginian Pilot, you can twist the story. You can lie via headline.

The Pilot has still not given its readers the information they need to judge the character of the “12 Cartoons.” How about this headline: The Virginian Pilot lacks the guts to oppose Islamofacism. But we don’t need a headline to know that.