The first headline on my news feed today reads:
Second Stimulus Package: Trump Didn’t Issue Executive Order Today, Here Is What He Said About Extending Unemployment Benefits, Payroll Tax Cut, Eviction Moratorium And Student Loans (link)
This is just plain confusing — what does the semicolon (:) apply to — all the comma separated phrases beyond it? Or maybe only the first one. If only the first one, then what does the phrase “Here is what he said about” apply to? each of the following things? Or just the first one, and other items are just other things in the news? If the hope was that to satisfy these burning curiosities, people will click and read the article — maybe it works for some people. I would just move on to more well-formed headlines.
So, the second headline reads:
Trump banned TikTok and WeChat. Are video games next? (link)
This one is a bit more balanced — I had heard about this earlier, and there is a possibility that the ban orders from earlier may extend to video games owned by the companies affected by the ban.
Clicking on the article goes through a lot of background and it turns out the question in the headline is rhetorical — the article doesn’t answer it directly. But compared to other things, this is an ok article.
The third headline reads:
Russia, China and Iran seeking to influence US ahead of elections, top intelligence official says (link)
This headline is ok. The good thing is that it makes a direct statement about other countries meddling with US elections, which is relevant. However, they could have stated which country took whose side in the headline — the reason for not doing that may be to get people to click on the link. Here is a much better headline that gives the missing information:
Intelligence community’s top election official: China and Iran don’t want Trump to win reelection, Russia working against Biden (link)
The fourth headline reads:
This Is What’s Holding Up Your Second Stimulus Check (link)
I (and many other readers as well, I suspect) am not receiving stimulus checks. The word ‘your’ refers to the subset of readers collecting stimulus checks. Blanket statements making something seeming to apply to the reader or a larger class makes the article seem more important or relevant. The headline could have replaced the word ‘your’ with ‘the’ and it would sound more sincere. Another example of this is in headlines like this one from a few weeks ago:
While America mourns John Lewis, Trump continues to divide the nation (link)
What does it mean for America to mourn John Lewis? Does it mean everyone in America? Does it mean the majority of Americans? Also, does it mean that everyone referenced is only mourning, and doing nothing else? That is the only way to explain the structure of the sentence — since it seems implicit that Trump cannot both mourn and do other things alongside. Maybe the news really was the death of the person, and the word ‘mourn’ is just used to make the headline seem more emotional and personal (and to continue to reference the unfortunate death of a natural figure a few days after the event).
Well, so far it seems like all the top headlines have room for improvement.
Skimming through the rest of the news, the most interesting article for me today was this:
Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (link)
This article is fascinating because a feature of one popular technology (how dates are detected in spreadsheets) is limiting the naming and vocabulary of gene naming, as well as other domains that may run into a conflict with such type detection. It reminds us that changing conventions in mature software and other traditions becomes so hard that it is sometimes easier to change the affected domains, even at great cost.
