Headlines vs. content

Headlines tell us something. Authors rarely get to choose them, so they become a reflection of how the editors hope to grab people's attention.

This occurred to me when I saw Tim Muth's guest blog about the Salvadoran elections in the Christian Science Monitor.  The content is about the delicate and uncertain coalition possibilities that exist for both the left and the right, but that the right did better in the elections. The headline, though, is "El Salvador Elections: Another Test for Latin America's Left."

Nowhere in the article did he write about the rest of the region, and nowhere does he use the word "test." This election has nothing to do with the Latin American left, which in any case does not exist in any unified form (and not even within El Salvador).

Several years ago I got a blogging bug in my ear about the incessant and simplistic media obsession with left versus right in the region. This seems to be another similar example--framing it in ideological terms is more sexy than discussing the more mundane question of building coalitions.