Agreed. And I hate headlines like this that mislead their audience. Headlines must be stand-alone true as >90% of the people who happen to see the headline aren’t going to read the article. A headline like this will leave many with the impression that contact tracing apps don’t work, not that they just haven’t gotten much buy-in.
(Which of course becomes self-reinforcing... If the vast majority of people who see the headline are led to think the apps don’t work, then they won’t want to adopt them... and low adoption is, of course, the very “failure” discussed in the first place...)
This may seem like a small thing, but the apparent license-to-lie-or-at-least-use-half-truths-in-headlines that many media editors (because editors, NOT journalists, control the headlines) believe they have is maybe the biggest problem in media accuracy we have. We are bombarded with 10-100 times as many headlines as we can possibly hope to read, which is a constant background noise of half-truths.
And yeah, of course a headline won’t be able to tell the full story. But it should be accurate enough and not misleading. The excuse of “but you have to read the full article or you’re just lazy” is a ridiculous cop-out for a license to lie.
" A headline like this will leave many with the impression that contact tracing apps don’t work, not that they just haven’t gotten much buy-in."
That would be an entirely accurate impression, contact tracing apps have a proven track record of not working so far. That one contributing factor is the lack of buy-in in the population does not detract from that point.
(Which of course becomes self-reinforcing... If the vast majority of people who see the headline are led to think the apps don’t work, then they won’t want to adopt them... and low adoption is, of course, the very “failure” discussed in the first place...)
This may seem like a small thing, but the apparent license-to-lie-or-at-least-use-half-truths-in-headlines that many media editors (because editors, NOT journalists, control the headlines) believe they have is maybe the biggest problem in media accuracy we have. We are bombarded with 10-100 times as many headlines as we can possibly hope to read, which is a constant background noise of half-truths.
And yeah, of course a headline won’t be able to tell the full story. But it should be accurate enough and not misleading. The excuse of “but you have to read the full article or you’re just lazy” is a ridiculous cop-out for a license to lie.