Averting Disaster

Romney Averts Disaster! That was the headline on the front page of the Los Angeles Times last week.  Oh my god, I thought, what did he do? Prevent a deadly auto accident? Did he show up at an air controller's station and prevent two planes from crashing and burning, thus saving hundreds of innocent people? Even more amazing did he don his superhero cape and halt a tornado in it's path sparing millions the horror of becoming homeless?


No, of course not. He merely won some primary election in some little state.  That was some disaster.  I guess if he had lost ....well I can't imagine anything really bad happening.  No one would have died, no typhoon would have hit Georgia, and the Earth wouldn't have even paused on it's path around the sun. No disaster that I could see.


You know, I think the disaster they were referring to was that had he lost the primary, some other candidate would have had an edge.  Wow! That's pretty heavy duty.  I can understand why the Times wrote such an impressive headline.


Seriously though, averts disaster? Who says the media is liberal? I would say that headline communicates a Romney bias.  "Disaster" is a fully loaded word. It's definitely not on the list of neutral language. Not only that, the headline doesn't even begin to tell the reader what the article is about. Just glancing at the headline one would think at the very least, that Romney had taken over from a suddenly dead pilot and safely landed his private jet.


I know a little about journalism and that headline shrieks bias.  My fifth and sixth graders have lessons on fact vs. opinion and propaganda.  I think they would say that headline is definitely an opinion.  And I would say opinion does not belong on the front page.