You might think article headlines have one job – to summarise the piece in a way that draws you in; a welcome mat, made of words. But there is more to them than that. A headline frames the story, and lets the reader know if it is news or opinion.
If an article is posted online, headlines strive to provoke, even annoy – anything for a click.
Headlines can also have a surprisingly powerful effect on what you remember about the article. Even in a piece about trust in the media, headlines can be misleading.
Can these titles all really refer to the same study? ‘Kiwis’ trust in news hits new low amid perceptions of political bias’, ‘New report shows trust in the news is improving’, and ‘Trust in news survey slump stalls after five years in freefall’.
They all link to the same 2025 ‘Trust in News’ survey from the Auckland University of Technology Centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy (CJMAD). Published every year since 2020, the report is “awaited with trepidation in our media” in the words of RNZ Mediawatch presenter Colin Peacock. Waiheke Islander, and former Gulf News editor, Dr Greg Treadwell is a co-author.
According to the study, 32 percent of New Zealanders say they trust “most of the news most of the time”. Although this sounds bad, it represents a drop of just 1 point after years in freefall. ‘General trust’ in news cratered in New Zealand between 2020 and 2024, plummeting 20 percent in five years.
So the headline ‘Kiwis’ trust in news hits new low’ is only technically correct. A one percent drop is not what a reader would expect to see under the words ‘hits new low’.
In fact, CJMAD’s report found trust scores for survey respondent’s favourite media, including Whakaata Māori (Māori TV), the Iwi Radio Network, RNZ and The Spinoff soared last year – up by 15 to 24 percent (although the margin of error is high in some cases).
The headlines ‘New report shows trust in the news is improving’, and ‘Trust in news survey slump stalls after five years in freefall’ are easier to justify. Several news outlets noted that trust in the New Zealand media had ‘stabilised’.
“We won’t know if trust has really stabilised until we do another report or two,” Treadwell told Mediawatch. “There’s a lot of things contributing to this. The Covid pandemic and all the sort of half-truths and lies that were told about the media … are receding. And I think maybe the media’s also done a really good job since trust became a really prevalent issue.”
In 2014, Ullrich Ecker, a neuroscientist at the University of Western Australia, studied the way headlines affect the way we remember articles. He found that misleading headlines make it more difficult to remember details in the article at odds with the headline.
His work was explored by the New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova in a thoughtful piece titled How Headlines Change the Way We Think. She shared the headlines she rejected for her story, including ‘Why Headlines Matter’; ‘Misleading Headlines Can Lead You Astray’; ‘How What You Read Affects What You See’ and ‘You’ll Never Believe How Important an Accurate Headline Is’.
“Almost every journalist,” she wrote, “has experienced the aggravation of having readers give enraged reactions to an article based solely on a headline. ‘Read the article!’ the writer wants to scream. What Ecker’s work shows, though, is that with the right – or, rather, wrong – headline, reading the article may not be enough. Even well-intentioned readers who do go on to read the entire piece may still be reacting in part to that initial formulation.”
The power of a title is not lost on politicians: the US is notorious for government bills with outrageously misleading names, like the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) which banned federal recognition of same-sex marriage (and was overturned in 2013 by the Supreme Court).
Although the New Zealand Parliament follows a more conventional approach, ministries don’t, and their reports can have titles which are far from neutral. The Ministry of Health is in hot water for a report with the benign title ‘Putting Patients First: Modernising health workforce regulation’. The Association of Salaried Medical Specialists director Sarah Dalton told The Post that while a review on regulation “is fine, this document claims to be something it’s not, it’s misleading in tone and misleading in content”.
Making a hash of a title isn’t always deliberate of course, especially if, like most sub-editors, you only have minutes to think of it. While The Guardian denies ever publishing an article about explorer Vivian Fuchs under the headline ‘Fuchs off to Antarctic’, it does admit to once shouting in boldface, ‘Sir Vivian Fuchs at palace’.
• Jenny Nicholls
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025
