The fault, dear Express, is in the headline

The brouhaha over The Indian Express story this morning will not end in a hurry. The story occupies the entire front page. In an unusual format, we see a three-line banner headline and a two-line strap. It has three names in the byline, including Indian Express editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta, and one name as a contributor. The three-line headline reads: “The January night Raisina Hill was spooked: Two key Army units moved towards Delhi without notifying Govt” [caption id=“attachment_266324” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Screengrab of today’s Indian Express paper.”]  [/caption] The headline does not use the ‘C’ word – but it certainly suggests, to any lay reader, that the army had gone rogue. The strap line says “alarm bells rang at the highest levels in Govt”. Sure, the ‘C’ word is not used – but it is implied – as clearly as an implication can be clear. The headline is alarmist, dramatic, and disturbing – and needn’t have been so. If one did read the entire story, once one crossed 2,000 words, one would have come across this: “To be fair, the MoD’s considered view now seems to be that it was a false alarm, caused by some non-adherence to Standard Operating Procedures (SoPs) by the Army and an alarmist civil/political reaction on a particularly distrustful day.” Why couldn’t this come into the headline? Why couldn’t the headline even have used the ‘C’ word – and said, “Government feared coup bid later proven to have been a false alarm”? The suggested headline encapsulates the article much more accurately – and less alarmingly – than the one The Indian Express chose to use. There is no case that The Indian Express should not have done the story – they should certainly have, even if it was not a coup bid. The fact that distrust has grown so much is a fact that concerns all of us. What The Indian Express should not have done is to sensationalise the story to the extent that it has done. As importantly, they should have closed the ‘loop’ in the headline itself and told readers (those who do not read entire articles but just absorb headlines) that the incident has been proven to be a false alarm. The layout, too, does not allay fears caused by the headline. None of the two boxes with highlights of the story says that the MoD had decided that the incident was a false alarm. One of the boxes has “Unanswered questions’, including this one: “Why wasn’t Ministry of Defence notified?” Actually the question is answered in the second box, where the army spokesman says, “Such routine training does not need authorisation.” While every word in the article might merit being there, it is in the creation of the headline, the choice of the elements that need to be highlighted in the boxes and the burying of the view that the incident was a false alarm that makes what could have been a thought-provoking and worrying article into something else.