EverydaySpy Podcast - How to Decode News Headlines and Skip the Slant

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

News headlines work hard to capture your attention in a few simple words. But those same headlines also give away a lot of information about their truthfulness, intent, and purpose. In this episode, Andrew shows you how to break down any news headline and know right away whether you can trust the information in the article. Don't miss this chance to look at everyday news and know right away if you can trust it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. It's impossible to talk about mastering information without also talking about the news. And it's funny because the news is one of those areas where I get asked the most questions. People ask me what news sources I like. People ask me which news sources I don't trust. People ask me if I like foreign news or American news. People ask me if I consume news on TV or whether I prefer it in writing, whether I prefer it on the phone, whether I like it on Twitter. It's amazing how many questions people have about the news.

And it tells me how invested people are in understanding real meaningful information. And I can completely relate to that because for me, information is everything. Information is what gives us the ultimate advantage. The advantage in business, in life, in personal security, in relationships. It's all about information. And one of those everyday areas where we all agree that information is coming in and information should be worthwhile and information should be trustworthy is when we talk about the news. Everything else kind of leaves information up for interpretation, right?

Like, some people trust their parents. Some people don't. Some people like to take advice from their friends. Some people don't. Some people see social groups and social media and friends and colleagues and coworkers as information sources. And some of them just see them as distractions and drama and drivel. But we all agree that the news, the news, headline news, television news, mainstream news,

is supposed to be someplace. that we can go to to collect meaningful, trustworthy information. But that has changed over time because we've heard new terms tossed around about the news. We've heard about disinformation. We've heard about misinformation. We've heard about fake news. We've heard about false news. We've heard about foreign meddling in the news.

So because of that, there's a lot of confusion about the news and about news headlines. So what I wanted to share today was a little bit of how I have learned when to trust a headline, when not to trust a headline, specifically how I go about reading just the headline and making an instantaneous assessment as to whether or not I can trust the information in that headline or if that headline is trying to trigger a bias inside me. And remember, we've covered the idea of cognitive biases and logical fallacies. If you recall, logical fallacies are arguments made from outside, but cognitive biases are something that exists inside us already.

So when we talk about headlines and biases, what I'm really saying is headlines and news is designed to capture an audience that has a specific internal bias. That's how news sources survive. That's how they've evolved over time. they want to come out and find an audience that already has predetermined beliefs and values, and then they want to feed that audience information with their own flair that they know feeds into that bias. So the idea of neutral news, that dream scenario that feels like it was make-believe when it existed in the 50s and the 40s, and even then it was biased, but it's become worse because of the business of news.

So I want to share today how I go about reading news from all sorts of different news sources. I read American news sources. I read foreign news sources. I read news sources in different languages. I read news sources through translations, through interpreters. So there's all sorts of places I go to get news. But here's something I do when I read every single headline. So I can know before I continue on in the article, the headline itself will tell me what

kind of bias, what kind of slant the entire article is about to have? And I like to know what that is so that I can prepare myself to turn off or to counterbalance my own personal cognitive biases or so that I can better understand the purpose and intent behind the article itself. And here's how it works. So every headline is basically comprised of somewhere between maybe five and 15 words. because a headline has to be something that captures immediate attention. There's a ton of science behind how headlines are construed and constructed, not just headlines in the news, but headlines that scroll across your TV, headlines that are used in advertisements, headlines that are used to sell products, or headlines that are used to interrupt a commercial

or interrupt your scrolling through Facebook or anywhere else so that it'll capture your attention quickly. So that's what I mean when I say a headline. Think about any time you've seen large font, bolded flashing text that pops up on your screen. It's really easy if you think about the typical newspaper because the typical newspaper has a headline before every article, but you'll still see those headlines, even in pop-ups that pop up on your phone, pop-ups on your laptop or your desktop, you'll see those headlines whenever a commercial comes across TV, the letters that are the largest that are bolded. When they kind of read in a sentence or sentence fragment,

those are what I'm talking about when I say headlines. In the news, the headlines are those pieces that tell us the bias within the article itself. So what I've got here in front of me, you can't really see it. But what I've done is I've actually opened several news sources from around the world, very popular news sources. I have Fox News open, I have CNN open, I have Routers open, I have France's International 24 open, I have the Times of Israel open, I have the Mexican Daily newspaper open, I have Al Jazeera open. So these are just a handful of popular news sources that exist around the world and news sources that I will look at to try to understand current events, kind of get a sense of opinion and attitudes towards,

what's happening in the world or towards new developments in international events. I use these sources and many, many other sources whenever I'm looking at the news myself. But what I want to do is kind of read through some of these headlines and tell you what these headlines trigger that make me know that there's going to be a bias, make me know whether I can trust the headline and thereby trust what's in the article, or whether I know I need to roll into that article with my guard up. So to start, I want to start with CNN. Now, today, I'm looking at this.

Obviously, the headlines change every day. But one of the things that caught me when I looked at the CNN headline summary, the landing page, the splash page for CNN today, is that there's lots of headlines. They do a really interesting job of kind of painting a whole screen full of headlines. So it's almost like a smorgasbord, like an all you can eat buffet of come in and read whatever you want to read. But one thing that caught me right away is that this one talks about, Boats participating in a Trump support parade sinking. And the specific headline says, Boats participating in Trump support parade sink, comma, officials say.

Now, when I read that headline, there's a couple of things that it immediately suggests to me. First, I don't expect this article to tell me anything substantive. Because in the headline itself, CNN, is basically saying that they're just parroting someone else's message. In the headline where it says, comma, officials say, they tag that on at the end of the headline. That's their way of saying, we didn't send a reporter, we didn't really do any research, we don't have any analysis for you. This is just what we have seen officials say. So when I go in to actually open that headline, what I find is that the entire news report, the whole report, is actually written off of a series of tweets.

that were submitted, that were posted by the police department in Texas where the parade happened. That's it. So it's Travis County Sheriff's Office, which is the Sheriff's Office that responded to the calls, the distress calls from the boaters. They posted several different tweets at the time of the event. Those tweets are actually the source material for the CNN News article. So let's just think about that for a second because we've talked about this already in this season. And it's very important to me to pause just for a moment to recognize that we live in a world now where social media can be treated like it is a source of valid information.

Social media can be is media that comes from anyone at any time. it is user generated. So if you have someone who is knowledgeable and well respected and of high regard, when they post something in social media, it is essentially exactly the same as if a lunatic who is intentionally lying posts to social media. So when I see news where the headline itself says that they are citing an external source, like this one, boats parading in a Trump support parade sink in Texas, comma, officials say, then I know that whatever that article is about to say is repeating to me something else,

that the newspaper itself did not use any journalistic practice to actually assess the news. I'm not going to get anything meaningful out of that report. Instead, what I'm going to get is a regurgitation of something someone else said. In this case, I'm getting a regurgitation of what Travis County Sheriff's officials said. And that is not, for me, valuable news. So that's how I would assess an article like that. Now, I looked up the exact same article because I was curious, understanding that CNN has its bias and Fox News has a different bias, I wanted to go ahead and see, what does this exact same story look like? What does this headline look like when I look it up in Fox News? And here's the

headline in Fox News on the same day. Multiple boats sink during Trump boat parade on Lake Travis in Texas. So the same story, right? Let me read you the first headline from CNN, boats participating in a Trump support parade sink, comma, officials say. And then when I read it in Fox News, multiple boats sink during Trump boat parade on Lake Travis in Texas. The first glaring difference is that in the Fox News headline, they're not claiming that someone else told them about the boat sinking. Right? In the CNN headline, they say that officials are saying it. So we know right out of the gates that CNN didn't go talk to anybody on the ground.

But when we look at Fox News here, it doesn't say that the information is coming from someone else. So interestingly, when I read that report that Fox News made about the boats sinking, you see that they actually sent someone to go do an interview of the police department, of people who attended and went to the parade itself, people who were actually. at the rally, first responders who went out and actually helped some of the boats that were in distress. So it's different. Now, I'm not saying Fox News or CNN is better or worse, but what I'm saying is that the headline itself, just those first five to 15 words, told us a lot about what we were about to read. In one, we knew that we were going to read basically the statements of someone else.

In the second article, we knew we were going to read something with more meaning because in the headline itself, it did not point at an external source. Now, there are some other interesting kind of nuances that go between the two headlines, specifically the words that they chose to use. So, for example, the CNN article calls the boats, or it calls the event, a Trump support parade, right? So that's right away, it is, the CNN article is kind of priming the audience in the headline that it is about to talk about a Trump support parade where boats participating were

sinking. So right away, it's kind of, it's poking fun at those that read this source of information because it knows the bias of the people who are reading. On the opposite side, on the Fox News side, when it talks about multiple boats sinking during the Trump boat parade, notice they call it a Trump boat parade. They don't call it a Trump support. parade. They call it a Trump boat parade. And they're trying to show more that the focus is on the boats sinking, not what the boats were doing in the lake. So it's just a very, it's nuanced,

but it's important to understand when you're choosing which headlines to spend your time reading, that every word in a headline is very deliberate. Some of those words are telling you where this information is cited from. Some of the words are specifically designed to trigger a bias in your head. So with CNN, it knew that the people reading were probably not going to support President Trump, and therefore they were happy to call it a Trump support parade where boats were sinking, whereas Fox News is assuming the majority of its readers do support the Republican Party and the current president, therefore they tried to keep it more to the facts. Multiple boats sink on Lake Travis in Texas during a Trump vote parade. All right, so let me give you something that's a little bit different.

I also decided to take a look at stories that came in from Reuters. Now, Routers is one of those news sources that I hold in relatively high regard. It's kind of cold. It's calculated. It's very direct. And I like it because when you look at the headlines, you get more of the fact, more demonstrable, proven, objective fact in the headlines itself. But because of that, the headlines sound much less excited.

and obviously they don't trigger an immediate bias. So here are some of the headlines in Routers today. Police hunt for man in Birmingham after stabbings leave one dead and seven injured. Portland protesters throw fire bombs at officers. Deal likely to fund U.S. government until early March. These are some of the examples of what you see in Routers. Now, Routers happen to actually cover the Trump. parade, the Trump boat parade in Texas also.

And here is their version of that same headline. Several boats sink at Trump Parade on Texas Lake. So again, here you have a neutral news source using very neutral, non-emotional, non-biased language. Several boats sink at Trump Parade on Texas Lake, which is very different than what we saw in the CNN article that talks about the Trump support parade. and even different still from what we see in Fox News when they talk about multiple boats sinking during Trump boat parade on Lake Travis. So a focus from Rooters on kind of cold, hard facts. There's no emotion. Nobody's talking about support.

Nobody's using words that are heavily biased. It's a simple way of looking at a headline that tells me that the information in that headline should be more trustworthy or should be. less slanted than information presented about the same story in a different news source. Now, I want to share with you a little bit about what I see in international news. So right now I'm looking at the homepage for France24.com. France 24 is a major news source in Europe. It's obviously located in France, and this is the English version of their news source. Now, what I really like about foreign news sources is that they have to,

to be translated from their native language into English. And the people who are translating the newspapers themselves aren't usually native English speakers. So I know a lot of people immediately think that that's news you can't trust because there's going to be something lost in translation. And while that is a valid concern, the way that international news sources offset that risk is they keep the language very simple. when you keep language simple, an unexpected consequence of that is that you kind of remove all of the emotion, you remove a lot of the bias, you remove a lot of the slant from that information. Now, that's not always the case. Sometimes a foreign news source is heavily slanted, and it staffs its English-speaking department with people who have a heavily slanted vocabulary against certain times.

topic. So it's not always guaranteed. And let me show you a little bit of what I saw here with France 24. So here we have one article that says seven New York police officers suspended over black man's death following a hooded restraint. Now that's a pretty straightforward headline, especially to be coming from a foreign news source. There's not a lot of emotion. There's not a lot of built-in bias. They're not using words that resonate more with someone who's Democrat or Republican, male or female, African American, or white, they just kind of use clear, basic language that would resonate with the average European who is speaking English or reading in the English newspaper. Seven New York police officers suspended over black man's death following hooded

restraint. Now, the same homepage also has another article about New York. Now, just listen to the words and see how different you respond emotionally. New York's poorest families anguish over risky choice to send kids back to school. That's a different headline from the same news source on the same home page, but you can see how different the headlines read. In one, you're talking about numbers, locations, ethnicities, right? Seven New York police officers suspended. But in the other one, you're talking about emotions. You're talking about families. You're talking about non-tangible or intangible, non-measurable things like risk.

New York's poorest families anguish over risky choice to send kids back to school. Right away, the first article about the seven New York police officers is telling me I'm about to read about something that has evidence behind it. activities, actions that seven New York police officers carried out and how they were suspended for those actions. But when I look at that second article, what am I about to read? When I see a headline that says New York's poorest families anguish over risky choice, I have no idea what I'm about to read. The only person who's going to read an article like that is somebody who already believes or who already relates to the feeling of having a risky choice sending their kids back to school in a large city.

That's the difference between one headline and the other headline. One is based in fact. One is based in feeling. So when I go and I look at the headline that's based in fact, I'm anticipating something meaningful and something measurable and something that's going to give me information that is helpful and objective. When I look at the second article, I'm not expecting helpful objective information. I'm expecting bias, emotional, slanted information.

So you can see, just like we saw the slants in the U.S. news sources, it exists as well in the foreign news sources. I'm toggling over real quick to look at the Times of Israel. Here in the Times of Israel, I see a headline that says, One Dead, Seven Hurt, in Stabbings in UK Birmingham. Police say no sign of Terror Link. That is a straightforward measurable objective headline. If I read that, I'm expecting to see facts and figures, places, and people that are giving me some sort of substantive information from which to understand a current event. When I look just at the next headline down, Netanyahu said to promise prayers will be safeguarded under any holiday lockdown.

You can see again, just like with France 24, the difference in the difference in the way. the words that are being used in these headlines. Here you've got promise, safeguard, lockdown. Netanyahu said to promise prayers will be safeguarded under any holiday lockdown. Compare that to the same page, a completely different article with a headline that's focused on facts and figures. The one dead seven hurt and stabbings in UK Birmingham. This is how I look at a headline and decide whether or not I can trust what that headline

is about to say. Whether I can trust the article and the information is going to be unbiased or biased, slanted or unslanted, neutral or politicized. Before you ever even take the time to commit or invest yourself in the article itself, you can just look at the headline and get a sense for whether or not the author is trying to hijack your attention, twist your emotion, or leverage a bias that they already know exists in you. And if you become aware of what the headline is trying to do, you are going to offset any bias that you might have inside you. We all have cognitive biases. We've already covered that.

It's something that we develop over time. It's wired in us. It's natural. It's human. But you don't always have to give in to that bias. And one of the things that you can do to keep yourself safe and offset the bias is simply look at the headline before you consume the information. Before you consume the information, and assess what is the intent behind the headline. What are the words that they're using? What bias are they trying to present to? What is the audience they're trying to attract? Because when you take a moment to assess the information before you consume it,

then you are one step ahead of everyone else because you are able to pick and choose what information is objective versus subjective, while everyone else is just reacting in the moment emotionally. And if you know how to consume information that is objective and meaningful and beneficial to you, you will always have the advantage over anyone who is emotionally reacting to the information they're being fed. That's how you win. That's how you stay ahead. That's how you defeat the cognitive bias that other people are trying to twist and manipulate in you. And that.

is Everyday espionage. Everyday espionage is dedicated to one thing, educating everyday people. I know that not everyone will listen, but those who listen will learn. If you learned something new today, click subscribe, review, and share the podcast with a friend.

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