The Verge says it ran the wrong headline

Sarah Joeng, a features editor at The Verge, writes about how it ran the wrong headline with the story about the firing of two Federal Trade Commission commissioners.

Joeng writes, “News outlets — including The Verge — all went up with their articles as fast as they could. The headlines and stories across the board were pretty similar; the blowback from readers was evenly distributed. ‘This is wildly illegal,’ one person wrote in The Washington Post’s comment section. ‘Just say that. Don’t say the fired people said it was illegal. Say it as the Washington Post when you know it’s true. Democracy dies, thanks in part to this rag.’

“We also caught flack for our own headline, which put ‘illegal’ in quotation marks, attributing it to the Democratic commissioners. “@theverge.com, y’all need a more accurate headline,” a reader told us on Bluesky. ‘They’re not SAYING they were illegally fired, they WERE illegally fired. The precedent set in Humphrey’s Executor almost a century ago makes that crystal clear – but you don’t address that until the next to last paragraph. DO BETTER!’

“This is a pretty typical dynamic when the news hedges, equivocates, or neuters its language in the face of an ongoing legal dispute or uncertain outcome. Some news outlets do this reflexively as a general philosophy; it’s why infamous phrases like ‘officer-involved shooting’ and ‘racially tinged’ are so common in the media. At The Verge, we try to call things as they are — up to a certain point. There are journalistic ethics and legal limitations that will leave us sounding ludicrously cautious in many situations. This situation, however, should not have been one of them, but the extraordinary weirdness of what happened caught us flat-footed.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.