After the media misinformed the public by drastically shortchanging the number of participants during last year's Iraq war protests, I decided to play close attention to the reports of today's amazing turnout for the abortion-rights demonstration in Washington D.C. Well, after some web searching I have found some interesting headlines.
Earlier this evening on CNN's website, there was a headline that read something like, 'Thousands Demonstrate for Abortion-rights.' The reason I am paraphraisng their headline is that they eventually changed it to, 'Abortion rights protest packs National Mall.' Of course, the word 'packs' gets them out of having to lede with a number.
The Associated Press headlined with, 'Tens of Thousands of Women Gather for Abortion-Rights Rally.' So, we go from thousands on CNN to tens of thousands from the AP, which is strange because within both stories even the conservative estimates show well over 250,000 participants.
Then, and this one is very interesting, Reuters UK has a story entitled, 'Hundreds of thousands protest Bush abortion policy,' but the Reuters US story is entitled, 'Thousands Protest Bush Policies on Abortion.' This might not seem like that big of a deal until you start to read the U.S. Reuters story and realize that it is the exact same story as the Reuters UK story. Both stories were written by Deborah Zabarenko. Who would have changed the headline from hundreds of thousands to thousands? That is a really big change. How is it more important for the UK readers to know that hundreds of thousands protested then it is for the Americans to know it?
The reason that I am focussing on the headlines of these stories is because we all know that the headline is as far as most people get with a story. It is the soundbyte, so to speak. The way these numbers are reported is extremely important because it gives the general public a reflection of the importance of a story. Thousands demonstrating for abortion-rights might get an eyebrow raise, but hundreds of thousands will probably get someone to tell someone else about it. It really can mean the difference between just a few people paying attention, and a whole country sitting up and taking notice.