Front page headline in USAToday on Monday, Aug. 8, 2011: "How bad will it get?"

What exactly was the "bad" under discussion? Was it the 29,000 children who have already died in Africa (U.S. Gov. statistic, released Aug. 4, 2011) because of the current drought? Was it about the women who carry dying children, sometimes for weeks, in the feeble hope that the in camps they will find help? Was it the children who die daily because of lack of clean water? Was it the thousands of women who live in unimaginable horror because of sex slavery?

The subhead in USAToday clarified the headline: "As the USA's lowered credit rating takes the air out of the stock market, bad economic news ripples around the globe."

Another headline in USAToday, from the Associated Press on Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2011. This headline was on page 5A, lower left corner (for whatever it is worth, the page placement that gets the lowest readership of any area on the page). This headline said: "Famine threatens Somali children"

Threatens? Threatens? 29,000 already dead and the headline mitigates the horror by using the totally misleading verb "threatens." [Read more...]