Breast Implant Explodes While Using iPhone

Headline: “Woman’s Breast Implant Explodes After Playing Game For 4 Hours On iPhone”

If you read this headline and no further, what is the logical assumption to make? Answer: the iPhone is to blame for the breast implant exploding.

This would, in fact, be a faulty assumption. Upon reading past the headline, one sees the woman had a low quality breast implant and lay on her stomach, thus increasing the pressure on the cheap implant, for four hours. She happened to be playing a game on an iPhone, but could just as easily have been reading “Mother Jones” or “The New Republic”.

You are probably asking yourself “What in the world difference does that make Farm Boy?”

The reason it makes a difference is that it is another example of how the media can tweak a story subtly to influence the reader’s emotional response. If the writer of the headline had not meant to influence the way you felt about the story it would have been written “Woman’s Breast Implant Explodes After Lying On Stomach For 4 Hours”. Adding the iPhone was clearly an attempt to influence you into thinking the iPhone had some causal effect on the exploding implant.

It would not be surprising at all to find that the writer of the story had either had a bad experience with an iPhone or had some direct or even tangential relationship to Samsung or some other iPhone competitor.

This subtle use of language to influence the consumers’ feelings about a story happens literally thousands of times a day. I do not believe it is done unintentionally. These tweaks are made by communication specialists. People who went to college, generally under very liberally leaning professors who believe in activism in journalism, to learn how to effectively communicate a message. They know how to phrase things to get the reaction they are striving for.

This is not just a tactic of the left though. You can find examples of the same behavior on the right also. Read any NRA publication, or Republican National Committee publication and you can see examples of the same on the other side.

I guess my real gripe is, why can’t the so called news outlets just give us the news without their own personal agendas being introduced. They have enough influence just by controlling the stories they choose to tell and not tell. They don’t need to be secretly editorializing during the telling of the news.

It would seem to me that if an organization is going to call itself a “news” organization, or if it is going to call its product a “news” paper, TV show, radio show, then it should not editorialize without indicating that that is what it is doing. If it clearly states that what is to follow is an editorial comment, then they can knock themselves out. If they fail to do so and do their editorializing in the underhanded way by choosing to use adjectives that will predispose you to feel one way or another, this should be stopped.

If I pick up a “Shooting Sports USA”, I know it is written from a certain perspective and they make NO secret about it. If I read “The Democratic Strategist”, I know it will be written from the opposite perspective. If, however, I pick up a newspaper, I should be able to feel comfortable that the only editorializing I find will be on the Editorial Page. Unfortunately, that is seldom the case.

I think we should all boycott any media stream that claims to be giving the news while subtly editorializing.

Or so it would seem to an Old Farmboy!