By Farooq Kperogi Sensationalism, exaggeration and strategic ambiguity are part of the craft of headline casting. Headlines are designed to...
By Farooq Kperogi
Sensationalism, exaggeration and strategic ambiguity are part of the craft of headline casting. Headlines are designed to arrest attention, provoke curiosity and compel the reader to read the story.
Sometimes headlines even flirt with little harmless factual distortions in the service of attracting the attention of the reader.
But social media has fundamentally altered how headlines function. In an age of non-reading, instant gratification and perpetual scrolling, the headline is no longer a gateway to the news. It has become the news itself.
And the consequences are obvious. People no longer read. They skim, react, share, argue and conflate the headline with the story.
Take this headline about former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, who will be 89 in two months, declaring that he will not stop having children.
Being old school, I clicked the link to the headline and found that what Obasanjo actually said was:
"I am no more giving birth to children, and my children are now adults. But my children are still having children, and my grandchildren are having children, so I will never stop having children."
In other words, he was speaking figuratively about lineage and continuity, not biological procreation.
But if Daily Trust had written a literal and faithful headline such as, “‘I am no more giving birth to children,’ Obasanjo says,” most readers would have hissed and scrolled past it.
Why would it be newsworthy that a nearly 90-year-old man says he is done having children? Even if he wanted to, biology would have the final say.
But the more sensational framing, which intentionally collapses metaphor into absurdity, is irresistible. It invites mockery, disbelief and viral engagement.
On Daily Trust’s social media pages, countless readers assumed Obasanjo was claiming he intended to keep fathering children at nearly 90. And the comments are rib-ticklingly hilarious. They will have you in stiches. But they are animated by an inaccurate assumption.
This is not merely a problem of lazy readers. It is a structural problem of headline culture in the platform era.
When editors knowingly write headlines that can only be properly understood by reading the story, while also knowing that most readers will never read the story, they are manufacturing misinformation.
The old logic of headline writing no longer holds. In the age of social media, a headline is no longer an invitation to read the news. It is assumed to be the abbreviated version of the news.
Editors and copy editors need to reckon with this reality. Headline casting must evolve.
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