From the Editor’s Desk: Sensational

I’ve never been a fan of exaggeration or hyperbole, and I guess I’ve brought that sensibility to my writing because I find myself recoiling more and more at the sensational and inaccurate ways in which news organizations communicate what’s happening in the world.

I don’t like this because it puts clicks—money—ahead of common sense and doing the right thing. It’s the culmination of decades of quality decline in news and the steady rise of sensationalism over reality. You can see it most clearly in our partisan news organizations, a term that should be an oxymoron because news, by definition, shouldn’t be biased, it should only be reported. But news is a business, and unbiased reporting does not sell. Scaring people does.

Here’s a typical example. I’m sure you’ve all seen the sensational way in which weather is now reported, at least in the United States. “Snow threatens 110 million Americans,” the headlines bleat, not to mention that most will get a dusting at best. The New York Times and The Washington Post have both sunk to this style of weather headline recently. Shame.

I saw another amazing spin on this type of headline recently on staid CNBC, of all places. “These savings accounts earn a 1,600% higher interest rate than traditional ones, but most Americans don’t use them,” a headline in my feed noted. It caught my attention because it seemed absurd. So I had to look.

According to the story, traditional savings accounts have an annual percentage yield (APY) of just 0.23 percent, but so-called high-yield savings accounts have an APY of about 4 percent. If you parked $10,000 in each, the traditional savings account would earn $23 in interest in one year, while the high-yield account would earn $400.

That’s a difference of $377, obviously, and, as obviously, a high-yield account yields more interest than a low-yield (traditional) account, thus the names. But if you do the math on that, the high-yield account earns 1,600 percent more interest that a low-yield account. Thus the headline.

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that few people sitting on $10,000 would leave it in a low-yield account unless they intended to use it soon, the article takes its time getting to the fact that customers can’t access money in a high-yield account as easily or quickly as they can with the low-yield account: “it might take a few days to process a withdrawal,” the article finally explains. Ah. Then the two accounts aren’t comparable, and they aren’t used for the same purposes.

This is still good information—some people surely are doing the wrong thing with their money—but the headline is needlessly sensational. And that was doubly interesting to me, because I was recently faced with the dilemma of whether I should write a similar headline.

A month ago, Amazon reported its latest quarterly earnings, and I fell into a very familiar pattern in which I engage in the only kind of math I’m good at because I do it so much: comparing a company’s net income and revenues with the same quarter one year ago. And in that quarter, Amazon’s revenues were up 9 percent year-over-year (YOY), which is straightforward. But their net income (profits) was down … 4,767 percent?

That can’t be right, I thought.

For sure, I doubt myself a bit too easily. But I also do this kind of math a lot, and when I see numbers that don’t make sense, I just run them again. Clearly, I made a mistake. But I did it again and again and kept coming up with the same number. The issue here is that Amazon made a heady net income of $14.3 billion in the year-ago quarter, but it reported a comparatively sad net income of just $0.3 billion ($300 million) in the most recent quarter. Was I so inclined, I might have used the headline “Amazon profits plummet by 4,767%,” I guess. I was not inclined. In fact, I discussed the math with two other people before even putting that figure in the article.

Anyway, I’m starting to see similarly sensational headlines in personal technology stories now too. This puts me in a tough spot: I don’t like going after the people who write nonsense, but I also have a hard time keeping my mouth shut. And while it’s only a matter of time before lazy blogs start pushing out headlines like “1.5 billion Windows users threatened by latest zero-day vulnerability,” there’s still all kinds of low-level silliness out there. Stop me if you follow me on Twitter already and enjoy—or endure—my roasting of bad headlines.

I’m particularly sensitive to headlines concerning Microsoft and Windows, of course. For example, I don’t like headlines that claim that Microsoft has added a new feature to Windows 11 when, in fact, that feature is only being tested in the Windows Insider Program. These headlines make it appear as if anyone running Windows 11 now has this new feature and they’re nothing more than deceptive misinformation. And a disservice to readers, which is contrary to the point of writing news in the first place.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced new Dev and Beta builds for Windows Insiders, and among the changes being tested is an enhanced volume mixer that seems aimed solely to put a third-party product called EarTrumpet out to pasture. Laurent’s headline is accurate, noting that “Microsoft Starts Testing Enhanced Volume Mixer in Quick Settings.” That’s what I want to see, and it’s what any consumer of this news deserves: the truth.

Other headlines, like “Windows 11 is finally getting a much better volume mixer and sound settings menu” and “Windows 11 is finally getting a modern audio mixer,” are less accurate, but not egregious: this feature is being tested right now, though it won’t definitely appear in Windows 11 in the future. But it probably will. No harm, no foul.

There are worse examples, of course, but I just thought of the perfect headline: “1.5 billion Windows users threatened by lazy bloggers and inaccurate headlines.” Nailed it.