INDC Journal frowned on Express last week for what it calls a “bizarre” headline in the May 18th edition of the paper, regarding George Galloway’s testimony before Congress defending himself from accusations that he profited from Iraq oil holdings.
… the lead was that the criminally charged British MP flew to Washington, DC in order to lecture our Senators for their decision to go to war. What an astonishing choice of headline.
Having read the article, I can see how the headline arises: Galloway is clearly rebuking senators on Iraq. (Even the BBC article I link above is headed “Galloway takes on US oil accusers.”) It looks like the complaint is that the headline makes it sound as though Galloway’s laying down the law and schooling Congress on going to war period.
Now, INDC and The Countertop Chronicles (which also rebuked Express on the article) appear to feel this is part of a calculated strategy by Express to hew to the Post’s editorial left-wing agenda, but frankly, that’s highly unlikely, for several reasons. For one thing, there’s no editorial contact between Express and the Post’s editorial body, just as the Post’s own newsroom has no connection with the editorial staff. There’s also no connection at all between Express and Newsweek. In fact, I sometimes get the impression people at WPNI don’t even know Express is published from the same building. And finally, I would hardly describe the Post’s editorial department as “liberal” in the New York Times sense. This is the newspaper that argued heavily in favor of the war in 2003, took forever to pick a presidential candidate (yes, they chose Kerry, but not by much) and dumped Ted Rall as a cartoonist last fall.
Furthermore, as INDC admits, this is an AP article, not a Post article. While the headline is Express’s responsibility, I don’t see this as being a deliberate attempt to slam the war effort, but rather a short lead most likely composed fairly close to deadline (as the cover is one of the last pages shipped, typically) without malicious intent. Granted, I’m not Express’s ombudsman, but that’s my opinion. I suppose it does highlight the need for heightened awareness of a headline’s impact, though.
For the record, I took a quick look through Express’s letters section for the week* and didn’t find any references to the headline. Now, I don’t have access to their inbox, so that doesn’t necessarily mean nobody wrote them about it, just that no letter appeared on the topic. Make of that what you will.
* This isn’t as easy as it sounds — the PDF plug-in for Safari in OS X v10.4 eats an enormous amount of RAM, and on a 640 MB iBook G3, every byte is precious; sysctl vm.swapusage now reports 768 MB in use!