1115.org

Nine days ago, I wrote about the guy who’s responsible for the headlines in the right column of TPM’s main page, and how alarmingly misleading some of those headlines can be.

My conjecture was that the headline writer doesn’t actually read the stories that he’s producing headlines for. Here’s more evidence consistent with that conjecture.

Yesterday, he produced this headline: Saudis And Blackwater Donated Generously To Clinton Foundation (which is still up this morning).

There were stories all over the media yesterday about the Clinton Foundation’s donor list. Many of them pointed out that the Saudi government and Blackwater were both among the donors. None, I think, went so far as to call Blackwater’s donation generous.

The first thing is that when you click on the link the headline is attached to, you arrive at this TPM Election Central post. Surprise, surprise! Blackwater isn’t even mentioned in the post. Once again, the headline totally misrepresents the post. (The headline writer obviously just assumed that the TPM Election Central post mentioned Blackwater.)

The second thing is that to bracket the Saudi And Blackwater donations together, and to describe both as generous is ludicrous. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia gave $10 million to $25 million, while Blackwater gave $10,001 to $25,000.

This is all the more egregious since the post the headline takes you to says “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia gave more than $10 million”. With no mention of Blackwater’s donation, any reader who accepts the headline at face value will go away with the impression that Blackwater must have had a million-dollar donation too.

The funny thing is that TPM prides itself on being a news organization. They hire people they call reporters. They are proud of themselves for producing original reporting.

For such an organization to take such a cavalier approach to news headlines on their home page makes no sense at all.