By Ila Ananya

When you’re reading through the news, you’ve probably come across sweeping headlines that scream for your attention. For instance, DNA ran this article in April this year: “Forced to eat mutton by hubby, vegan woman hangs herself,” or, as Mirror reported last year, “Newlywed hangs herself after husband takes away her phone because she was always on Facebook and WhatsApp.” There’s also “UP woman gang-raped for refusing to join dance troupe,” in July this year. Also in the same month: “A one-sided love story led to the brutal murder of Swati,” after she was killed at Nungambakkam railway station in Chennai. If for a moment we keep aside the fact that stories of rape and suicide are always run with terrible images, these gendered headlines have also already passed a judgement and shrunk a serious issue into something trivial.

There have been lots of debates about media trials. If you’ve seen Rustom (2016), the judge listening to the case in the otherwise-terrible movie begins every court session by sending the editor of a tabloid to be locked up for a few hours, for publishing stories that have already passed their own judgement on the case before it’s closed. The media is known to pick sides, to pass judgements and influence public opinion in the way that it chooses. When you read a report that says, “Muslim man charged with smuggling beef in Kodagu, sent to judicial custody”, the word “smuggling” gives rise to all sorts of associations, as though beef is contraband in this Karnataka district; as though the man has been doing something illegal and wrong. Headlines – even when they perhaps (according to the most optimistic worldview) don’t really mean to imply the things they’re saying – do the same thing.

Take, for instance, the headline, “Forced to eat mutton by hubby, vegan woman hangs herself.” The only takeaway from this headline is that the woman has committed suicide due to this triggering event. The headline suggests that trigger is the whole story and ignores that there was probably a history of domestic abuse that led to the suicide. Instead, we’re given the sense that just maybe, the woman wasn’t strong enough to be able to deal with her husband’s demands.

Like images in news reports, headlines attract readers. So what does it mean to say that a woman was killed for doing something? Or that she was raped for not doing something? Take the case of the headline, “A one-sided love story led to the brutal murder of Swati” — there’s an underlying sense of blame that any reader might pick up unconsciously. Yes, the headline says the murder was brutal, but it doesn’t say much else: there’s nothing specific in it about the man who killed her, except for presenting him as a lover who Swati hadn’t loved in return.

For “UP woman gang-raped for refusing to join dance troupe”, the word “for” seems to rest the blame on the woman who refused to join the dance troupe — if they’re trying to convey how decisions like refusing to join a dance troupe can push some men to rape a woman, or that an individual choice of rejecting a lover can lead to murder, their choice of words don’t convey this. These reports seem to have no acknowledgement of sexual violence outside of this individual case.

In each of these reports, we have been presented with a judgement through the headline and as readers, we’ve already been told how to read the story and through what lens we should see the people involved. We are not unbiased readers. If a woman uses a lot of Facebook and WhatsApp, and her husband takes away her phone, we aren’t asking why the husband should decide how much of social media that the woman can use. Neither are we investigating other possible instances of domestic abuse. We wonder why such a ‘small’ incident – the headline strives to make the point that the cause was trivial – led to suicide. There’s no sense of questioning the experiences and behaviour of those who have committed and suffered the crime.

For hard-working subs and desk hands in old-fashioned newsrooms, a particularly good headline was often a private pleasure. Who would remember your acrobatic word-play or cultural referencing another day except other headline addicts, amateur or pro? In the modern digital newsroom, a headline is the difference between a story going viral, being utterly unread or worse, somewhat dead (a few hundred pageviews). The temptation to crank it up, crank it out when you are working on 25-30 stories a day is so high, headlines can only become more responsible if there is an office-wide ‘buy-in’ as they say in corporate circles.