Social media influence: Peril in the headlines

The greatly-derided craft of writing newspaper headlines is, like all other skills, constrained by the iron rules of science: a fixed line of space cannot accommodate an infinite number of legible characters in a given size and font.

A headline can suggest, deliberately or otherwise, opinion, bias and values. A classic example, thought to be apocryphal yet attributed to the London Times in possibly the 1930s is ‘Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off’.