Suppose you saw a headline saying, “President admits activity was criminal in nature.” If you loath the president, you might infer he did something criminal and rush to post the article on Facebook or tweet it. If you support the president, you will probably interpret it in a way favorable to the president. You might assume the activity was by some enemy of the president or perhaps someone in the administration who betrayed the president with their misdeeds. You might even conclude that it is fake news. But if you are a critical thinker, you would read the article and assess its credibility before drawing an inference about the activity. This headline is an example of a misleading headline, because very different articles could have the same headline.

Saying “the president admits” would tend to lead people to think the president is involved in the activity; either that he committed the act, or someone connected to him did. But the article could be different from what it seems to imply. For example, the article might state that the president is agreeing that an act of violence done by one of his supporters was a crime. As another example, the headline could be extremely misleading, and the president might have made a quick remark about something completely unrelated to him that he agreed is a crime.

For the sake of this essay, I will adopt the general term of “headlining” to cover three aspects of misleading headlines.  The first is the intentional creation of a misleading headline as a rhetorical technique. A misleading headline is not a complete fabrication as that would simply be lying. A misleading headline has some connection to the truth but it is such that it is aimed to deceive the audience. This can be done in a variety of ways, such as using hyperbole (extravagant exaggeration), downplaying (casting it as less serious or less important), using vague or ambiguous wording, or by other rhetorical techniques.

There are, many reasons to create misleading headlines and more than one can apply. One common reason is to create a clickbait headline to generate ad revenue; the idea is that an honest headline would not be as interesting. I am not saying that headlines should be written in a dull manner and a headline that might seem misleading could be defended if it was intended to be interesting rather than to mislead. While there will be unclear cases, we can sort out the intentionally misleading headlines from those with the honest intent to be interesting. It is also worth noting that writers can create misleading headlines unintentionally due to failure of skill rather than a failure of honesty.

Another reason for a misleading headline is as a tool to influence the audience without using outright falsehood. Many biased sites and organizations have two seemingly conflicting goals. The first is to push a narrative and shape beliefs. The second is to retain some credibility as source of information.  Misleading headlines sitting atop factually correct stories allow a site to achieve both goals: the headlines allow them to mislead while the stories allow them to claim they are doing truthful reporting. The writers and editors might even have moral qualms about lying outright but be willing to mislead without technically lying.

The second aspect of headlining is when a reader is influenced to believe what the misleading headline is intended to imply. That is, they have been tricked into believing an untrue interpretation. For example, a person seeing the headline “President admits activity was criminal in nature” used by a site hostile to the president might interpret it as “president admits he committed a crime” and rush to Facebook to post about it. In truth, the president might have just agreed when asked if some crime done by a foreign leader was a crime. In this case the person is a victim of deceit: they believed the news source but have been misled by the headline. This is different from believing an outright lie as a misleading headline is not a complete fabrication and it often sits atop content that is not entirely untrue.

In such a case, the person is making three mistakes. The first is interpreting the headline in a misleading way without considering other plausible interpretations. The second is not reading the article. The third is not being critical of the claim and assessing it. The defense against falling for misleading headlines involves avoiding these three errors.

The third aspect of headlining is intentional misuse of misleading headlines. This occurs when the person is aware that the headline is misleading, but they use of it for their own purposes, often by posting the article on social media with their preferred interpretation of the headline. For example, a person who loathes the president might know that the “President admits activity was criminal in nature” headline is about the president agreeing that a foreign leader committed a crime. But they might post a link to the article while making some claim about the president’s guilt in the hope that others will be misled.

A person might even go so far as to create an entire YouTube video based on intentionally misinterpreting headlines. Such people might be called out for this by someone else on YouTube. People can, of course, also just lie about the content of an article and use that to make their straw man argument.

A defense against this tactic has three parts. The first is questioning the interpretation and considering other plausible interpretations. The second is to read the actual article to see the content. The third is being critical of the claims made and applying the rational methods of claim assessment. So, always go beyond the headlines.