By The Herald Editorial Board
This one isn’t Donald Trump’s fault; it’s on the Associated Press.
In referring to the Associated Press’ Aug. 23 analysis into meetings of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with those who made or pledged donations to the Clinton Foundation, Trump at a rally Wednesday in Tampa said, “Now it looks like it’s 50 percent of the people that saw her had to make contributions to the Clinton Foundation.”
If you read the story, that’s not what the AP analysis showed, but Trump appeared to take his understanding of the report not from the story itself but from one of the AP’s own tweets: “BREAKING: AP analysis: More than half those who met Clinton as Cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation.”
Trump got the tweet right. The AP didn’t.
What the AP reported — and what Trump and its own tweet failed to put into context — was that in an analysis of 154 visits with people who were not federal employees or foreign government representatives, 85 had donated or pledged money to the Clinton Foundation. The full analysis looked at records covering about half of Clinton’s tenure as secretary and totaled more than 1,700 meetings in person or by phone, meetings that the AP didn’t include because they would have been part of her official or diplomatic duties, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker reported Thursday.
But that context wasn’t included in the tweet or the lede paragraph of the article, but in the eighth paragraph. Nor does the original story say that Clinton was involved in pay-for-play, as Trump and others are alleging. But, based on the tweet, that would seem to be an assumption that many might make.
Tweets like that are a problem, just as misleading headlines are a problem for news organizations. And for the purposes of newspapers and other news outlets tweets serve as headlines, directing people to click through and read the full story. But not everyone reads past the headline or the tweet.
A study by Columbia University and the French National Institute earlier this year found that 59 percent of links shared on Facebook had never been clicked (or read) by the person sharing the linked story, which led one satire site online to post a story filled with nonsense faux Latin under the headline: “Study: 70 percent of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.”
An American Press Institute study in 2014 found that 3 in 4 Americans reported reading, watching or hearing the news daily, but that only 4 in 10 said that they read or paid attention beyond the headline.
That means that those who rely on headlines and tweets rarely are getting the full story, especially when those headlines and tweets are at best incomplete and at worst misleading.
But the harm may go even deeper. Another study from 2014, this one by Ulrich Ecker, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Western Australia, found that misleading headlines might be coloring the ability of a reader to accurately recall the details of the story, as Maria Konnikova reported in The New Yorker magazine.
In two separate trials Ecker had subjects read stories where the only variable was the headline, one accurate and one misleading. In stories topped by misleading headlines, the researcher found, the readers had difficulty making accurate inferences about what they had read.
“Even well-intentioned readers who do go on to read the entire piece may still be reacting in part to that initial formulation,” Konnikova wrote.
Headlines, and now tweets, require some skill and attention to detail, remaining accurate while drawing a reader into the story.
Obviously, with so few bothering to read or click through to the full story, an engaging headline or a “click-bait” tweet serves a purpose. But headlines and tweets that are misleading, even inaccurate, misrepresent the issue for those who don’t read the full story are a disservice to those who do.
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