How should we deal with claims that only appear in article headlines?

Question

A common occurrence that we commonly encounter on Skeptics^† is when the headline of a newsaper or magazine article contains a claim that is not supported by the rest of the article.

^† That clause would be far more powerful if I included real examples. Let me make up a fictional example:

• A scientific paper notes a correlation between longevity and investing in diamonds. The paper expressly points out it merely a correlation, and confounding factors such a wealth probably account for it.

• A journalist writes-up the journal article in a much smaller newspaper article. The journalist is careful never to claim causation.

• An editor writes the headline for the paper. (I am told it is rarely the original journalist who writes headlines - it is assigned to an editor someone who specialises.) The editor skims the article, and writes a click-baity headline: "Buying diamonds is healthy!" or "Could your fiancé save your life with a diamond ring?"

If we accept such headlines as notable claims, we get the silly situation of just pointing to the carefully-written article underneath the headline to debunk it.

Should we accept headlines that don't match their articles as notable claims?

Answer 1

A single instance of a claim is not quite notable: why would a lot of people believe it, and yet stubbornly avoid to repeat the claim elsewhere on the internet? Repetition and virality of claims is of great importance when deciding how to invest our attention.

We allow mass media articles as automatically notable because we presume that a certain slice of the readers will be convinced by a claim and believe it. Of course, this is a shortcut: some mass media claims are not interesting enough, or believable enough or even clear enough to be believed by many readers.

The case you bring is clearly of this sort: since the correction to the claim is written right under the title, we can presume that many readers will not have been convinced by the claim. For this reason I think that a clickbait title, if corrected in the article body, is not automatically notable.

However, if other notable sources repeat the claim, then they establish notability as always. If on the other hand, no one repeats the claim, we should assume it is not notable and avoid repeating it here.

Answer 2

It matters here which section of the paper the article appears, if its an opinion piece or a paid for op-ed piece then the title is usually some dudes idea and can be as click baity as they want, even within a trusted newspaper.

Example "A Step Toward Scientific Integrity at the EPA"
How to deal with it: the author of the article is making the claim.

For a regular article the title have some truth to it or the paper will loose its trustworthiness, so they will use some weaselly methods to use headline that has less truth to it such as "sources say" or "study finds". This means even if the headline is false the newspaper brand is not damaged, just who they are quoting. Scare quotes might be used here to do the same thing.

Example that may have started this question "Electric cars emit 50% less greenhouse gas than diesel, study finds"
How to deal with it: the guardians source is making an unsubstantiated claim, so check any study that might be relevant. This one is annoying because no one found a link to a scientific paper and the article pretends there is (and the guardian should feel bad about this).

Scare quote example "Nestlé, Hershey and Mars 'breaking promises over palm oil use'"
How to deal with it: eat more chocolate made by other brands.

The problem is universally journalistic standards are dropping and brands that used to be trustworthy are now being called out as fake news. I personally used to trust Reuters, the BBC and the Guardian until questionable youtube footage of the white helmets in Syria came out, now I think everyone is Info Wars level of trustworthiness.

Another example of these 'single quotation mark for a biased summary not a quotation', I just saw change in front of my eyes the BBCs "Ex-Trump aide Paul Manafort 'faces charges over Russia'" which now reads "Ex-Trump aide Manafort charged with US tax fraud over Ukraine work". Interesting times.