Welcome to Fish-Wrapping 101

Or maybe 404.

I have written a number of times in the past about how we are uninformed, malinformed, and misinformed by our mainstream news media and on the impacts on our political discourse that result (some examples here).

Our latest example comes to us from Newsweek. It’s not as egregious as some, where the bias lies in shading and emphasis, but it is so ridiculous that it deserves mention.

One of the things that media outlets, particularly print outlets, know full well is that a good many people never get past the first graph of a news article. That’s why the standard of “the 5 Ws” (who, what, when, where, why) exists; the idea is to get as many of the basic facts as high in the article as possible, if possible in the first graph, to ensure that the greatest number of readers will have them - because that’s often all many readers see and so form the impression they take away from it.

It’s also why the headline is important, as it should (and in practice does) frame the substance of the issue in a single line or two. One thing as readers we should be wary of is that the headline we see on an article from an outside source, for example on a news aggregator or a reprint of a wire service report, may not be the one the original source put on it and so may have a different slant or emphasis than was intended or even present in that original.

So know that in this case, that is not an issue. Newsweek is the original source and the headline involved is theirs.

Okay, the story.

On January 9, there were a series of 13 special elections in Virginia, two for state Senate seats, 11 for ones in the state House of Delegates. How did Newsweek report the results? Here is the headline and first paragraph:

Republicans Annihilate Democrats in Virginia Election Sweep
Republicans scored massive victories in elections held in Virginia on Tuesday, returning two GOP politicians to local legislature following the departure of the incumbents.

So what, beyond the hyperbole, is wrong?

Not one of those 13 races flipped a seat! Not one! The magazine took advantage of two large wins by GOPpers, one in the Senate and one in the House, to use “annihilate,” “sweep,” and “massive” to describe the overall result and focus the first 13 graphs of a 17-graph story on those two races.  Even that overstates it, as the 11 House races were mentioned just once, in the 14th graph, with the final three being about Glen Youngkin, a Biden-Trump poll, and that Newsweek had asked state parties for more comment.

As if that wasn’t enough, the two “big” wins weren’t all that big when you consider that one of the winners had run unopposed in his last race and the other was replacing a GOPper who had retired and also had run unopposed last time. (Thank you, Ballotpedia and Wikipedia.) To say these districts are overwhelmingly GOPper borders on understatement, so the size of the victories were no surprise.

Such is the state of too much of our national news media, where the search from drama frequently outweighs being informative or even making a stab at balance. There is an old saying among newspapers that “if it bleeds, it leads.” A modern version might be using “tricks for clicks” because “if it shocks, it rocks.”

For the moment, though, we have “Newsweak.”