In politics, you’re either on-message or you’re losing. Let’s get to it.
Welcome to On Message, a weekly look at where the battle lines are drawn and who is winning the war of words.
This week… Beyond the Headlines.
Even as the vast majority of our written media has moved from newspapers to the internet, the basic format has remained the same.
There’s a headline designed to grab your attention and get you to click – though some of us are old enough to recall headlines were designed to get you to buy the paper from one of those vending boxes on the street.
And then there is the main copy. Most news websites still use an inverted pyramid style where the most important information is at the top so you can increase the odds of reading what matters even if you bail on the article without reading it all.
But in a day when attention spans have shrunk to 280-character tweets, and TikToks have made YouTube videos seem interminably long… do news websites have a responsibility to ensure the headlines don’t lead readers to assume something that may not be the real news?
In one of our first episodes, I made the case the headlines needed to change what they were reporting related to the COVID pandemic.
Back then it was because they had been reporting cases and deaths. Once the vaccine was more widely available, it became an important part of the story to show how many shots were in arms, as well.
As we’ve learned, a pandemic is not a stagnant thing and the coverage has to be equally dynamic.
Today, with the Delta variant commanding headlines, it is time to change the headlines again.
Simply including the number of cases and the number of deaths doesn’t tell the real story because we’re not all, essentially, in the same situation. There are the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
A total case count is fine but a breakdown of vaxed/unvaxed is also helpful. That’s even more the case when it comes to hospitalizations and deaths.
If there is a bit of activism here is should be to make it clear that choosing to decline the vaccination puts you at a much greater risk.
One of the most prominent debates at the moment is whether to require masks in schools for kids too young to be eligible for the vaccine.
Clear numbers are hard to find on that one.
KSL and the Trib have started reporting the number of school children who test positive for COVID, though breaking the groups out into 5-10 and 11-13 is terribly unhelpful since 11-year-olds can’t be vaccinated. I imagine the data comes from the health department but maybe we could temporarily change that since the breakdown we care about at the moment is kids under 12.
Also, cases are don’t provide all the info parents want when trying to decide if they should send their kids to school in a mask or not. The number of hospitalizations and deaths for that group also seems like important information.
We all need to be savvy consumers of media and that means looking beyond the headlines – or at least understanding that all the information that matters won’t always fit there.
In a time when some people are looking for any reason to dismiss the media, getting this information right and presenting it in a way that helps people understand it and, more importantly, helps them make informed decisions, is crucial.
That’s it for this week.
More On Message in the next issue of the Utah Political Underground.
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