"Senator has kept Texas wealthy"
Pity the poor headline writers. They have a few seconds, ususally, to come up with five or six words that capture a story and fit the space.
Most of the time they get it right. Occasionally headlines are witty or pithy enough to deserve a nod of appeciation.
Today's frontpager about Tiger Woods's being set in the PGA Championship was nice: "Now that's a major surprise."
The creativity here -- a small sort of creativity, to be sure -- was the wordplay on major, referring both to the character of the tournament and to the scale of the upset.
Occasionally, however, headline writers get it wrong, and every now and then, spectacularly wrong.
So it was on the front page of today's Chronicle.
The story was a backgrounder on Kay Bailey Hutchison's career in the Senate, set to run on the day she announced for governor of Texas. The headline played off a theme of the article -- that Mrs. Hutchinson was good at bringing federal money home to Texas.
The problem is that the headline said more than the story justified. For the headline to be true, (a) Texas must be (and, for the relevant period, always have been) "wealthy" and (b) the senator's success at sending federal money back home must be the thing (or a thing) that has "kept Texas wealthy."
That's far more weight than the headline can bear. For starters, a state's wealth, in any recognizable economic sense, is far different from a state's receipts from the federal government. For another, the fed's money is largely a return of money from Texas taxpayers, and wealth is not created by cycling dollars to Washington and back.
Can we blame liberal bias here?
Probably not. Occam's razor cuts in favor of inexperience or inattention, not bias.
But it must be said that most conservatives I know would have instantly seen how the term "wealth" had been misused.
If there are any conservatives on our local newspaper's staff, however, it's a well-kept secret.
The online version of the story properly ditched the bad headline.
UPDATE: I have modestly revised and expanded this post. It needed a rewrite, and I gave it one. Thanks for the links from blogHouston and Lose an Eye.
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