Headline from the weekend on the iPhone app:
Fast rail link ‘to be approved’
This headline is showing signs and symptoms of:
Quotation in Headline
Not Being News Yet
Quotation in Headline
As long as I can find a crazy person and get them to say something or even take a quotation from another magazine or news source I can write pretty much whatever I want as long as it has quotation marks. What this does not do is actually mean that it is true. Someone’s opinion does not make fact. “Earth to reverse rotation” in a headline isn’t true but as long as some idiot said it to a reporter it could be in a headline. Standards at the Beeb have definitely slipped in this age of 24 hour reporting. Quick, get the story, even if it’s wrong!
Not Being News Yet
Unless the BBC have found the institutionalised corruption in the upper echelons of society that blights our individual and societal gains for the riches of the few then this is a headline about an event that hasn’t happened. Now, I don’t want to get picky (yes I do) but, shouldn’t news be about things that have happened? If the BBC had uncovered fraud and bribes then this would be news but I doubt the headline would be as they wrote it.