(Note to ID readers: I originally wrote the article which follows and posted it at my kids’ private blog several years ago. A commenter brought it to mind by way of something he wrote under one of my articles recently published at this site. What you’re getting below is a slightly edited version of the original article. Apologies in advance for its “preachiness” towards the end; my kids sometimes need to be preached at. -T.M.)
Most any writer and publication (s)he writes for attempts to draw readers’ attention with a good or “catchy” headline. This is not a liberal or a conservative thing, it is a media thing. I know that I, for one, am definitely guilty as charged, and I’m pretty sure that my fellow contributors here at Identity Dixie would admit to the same were they asked the question. A publication’s headlines will nevertheless and almost invariably reflect the writer’s and/or the publisher’s overall world and life view, when they’re not otherwise parodying its opposite. Nothing especially wrong with that in and of itself; just the way it is.
By the same token, most writers and publishers know that the vast majority of readers are generally not going to bother reading an entire article start-to-finish, but instead will read the headline, perhaps the first and last paragraphs, and will skim over the rest of a given article’s contents. If, that is, (s)he reads even that much. Everything in between is just unnecessary filler to the average reader, and with this knowledge in mind a clever writer possessing no scruples against utilizing the writer’s equivalent of a magician’s “sleight of hand” will strategically place what he wants his readers to consume at the front and back ends of his articles. Writers of a liberal bent are particularly prone to doing this sort of thing; “conservative” (scare quotes intentional) writers tend to hold their readership(s) in higher esteem, proportional to their commitment to genuine conservative principles.
The old adage we’re all familiar with that addresses such like states, “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Neither should one judge the contents of an article by its headline, nor its first and last sentences or paragraphs, nor a combination thereof, for that matter. To do so is to set oneself up to be “played for the fool.”
I have quoted him before dozens of times on this and similar matters, but it bears repeating in this instance a relevant portion of Noah Webster’s Advice to a Young Man Commencing His Education. Mr. Webster advised the young man in question that, as every man is endowed with the capacity to reason, it was evidently the purpose of the Creator when He made man that reason should be man’s guide, as opposed to the other animals not made in God’s image and likeness. Mr. Webster went on, however, to solemnly warn his young friend,
… But reason, unaided by experience and by revelation, is a miserable guide; it often errs from ignorance and more often from the impulse of passion.
I should point out here that by “revelation,” Webster wasn’t just referring to what I’ll call the biblical kind, but certainly that kind too; he was referring to both general and special revelation.
I trust you see where I am headed with all of this. Despite our God-given capacity to reason, men are nevertheless highly susceptible to what Mr. Webster called the impulse of passion, particularly when they’re only taking in a few fragments of a given story or event. You may see this ungrateful phenomenon in full relief in the comments under this article, among many, many others more or less like it. In this particular case, let us look at the headline that everyone read in his or her “newsfeed” or whatever, before they started disembarking off the reader bus.
A Six Year-old Girl Separated from Her Mother Was Sexually Abused at an Arizona Detention Facility
Having read the headline and nothing more so far, what is your initial reaction to it? If you’re a normal person your reaction is probably near to mine – sadness mingled with a healthy admixture of outrage, and a strong desire to hang the bastard that did this! Or to otherwise cut his you-know-whats off.
Natural enough and fair enough, but let’s do the abnormal thing and read past where a bunch of “readers” already disembarked:
Thanks to the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy that ripped thousands of children away from their parents at the border, a 6-year-old girl reportedly was sexually abused on at least two occasions at an Arizona detention facility. In response, she was forced to sign a form stating that she would stay away from her alleged abuser, The Nation reported.
That is the first paragraph of the article under the headline above-posted, the point at which the writer and/or the editors already know the remaining average reader will have stopped reading before skipping to the end to read the last few lines. But let’s read the second paragraph in any case, shall we, since you and I are not to be counted among the persons in your “average reader” group.:
According to the report, the girl, identified by the initials D.L., and her mother had fled gang violence in Guatemala. In May, they sought asylum at a border entry point in El Paso, TX. Two days later, immigration authorities separated D.L. from her mother and sent the young girl to an immigration shelter outside of Phoenix run by Southwest Key Programs.
Notice anything wrong here? Anything – relevant information – conspicuously missing? I don’t know about you, but I want to know a paragraph and a half back who did this! I could make assumptions and jump to conclusions like anyone else, but I want facts and I want them quickly. Stop crying me a river! Spare me all of the idiotic emotion-driven Trump bashing and give me the facts of the case! Namely, and most importantly, who is the perp?
Despite my impatience with the writer and his emotion-filled blather, I’m intent to read on and find out who the perpetrator was. If that information is buried somewhere in the article, that is to say; if it is not, I’ll seek it elsewhere. What I’m not going to do in any case, or under any circumstances, is to leap to conclusions based on a provocative headline and one or two equally provocative paragraphs plucked from the front and back ends of the full article. To do so would be stupid and irrational of me, and allowing myself to be played for the fool.
Finally, in paragraph 3, long after 98% of the common herd has skipped down to the final paragraph, ignoring everything written in between, we read that the alleged perpetrator is a 12 year-old immigrant boy of the victim’s same nationality and housed at the same facility.
Meanwhile, and as I said, our impulsive, impassioned and angry fellow “readers” skipped way past that paragraph and those that follow it, and read the following to close the article:
[A study] found that “in the past five years, police have responded to at least 125 calls reporting sex offenses at shelters that primarily serve immigrant children. That number doesn’t include another 200 such calls from more than a dozen shelters that also care for at-risk youth residing in the U.S.”
Boston Medical Center child psychiatrist Lisa Fortuna told ProPublica: “If you’re a predator, it’s a gold mine,” referring to the immigrant youth shelters.
Given the fact that we’re not given any details (one wonders why) as to who, what, when, where, why, or how all of these 325 accumulated reports of alleged sexual abuse involved; and given Ms. Fortuna’s quotation strategically placed to close out the article, how do you think the average reader (that “reader” in the 98 percentile group who rushed to virtue signal in the comments box before (s)he’d read a tenth part of the full article) is going to answer the who, what, when, where, why, how questions as they occur to his mind? Well of course (s)he’s going to make a bunch of assumptions and leap to conclusions, and those assumptions and conclusions will invariably reflect his worldview just like the article’s headline and first and last paragraphs reflect the worldview of the writer and are intended to assist the reader’s reasoning to err, both from ignorance of the details of the case, but more so from the impulse of passion. In other words, he’s going to make a damn fool of himself along with a host of other such fools.
Bottom line: Don’t be the average reader, otherwise known as a common fool and an idiot! Even when a writer isn’t as clever or as morally unscrupulous as I give a certain type of writer credit for in a preceding paragraph, you are still willingly setting yourself up to be played for the fool if you can be counted among the 98 percentile group mentioned above. Have a little more self-respect than that, eh? After all, a text out of context is a pretext, as they say. And of course, this principle applies across the board. e.g., when reading a book, a pamphlet, when contemplating causes and effects of historical events, and so on.
