A friend alerted me to the front page of the print edition of today’s Des Moines Register. He noticed something odd with the headline of their article about Iowa House Republicans picking State Rep. Pat Grassley, R-New Hartford, to be the next Speaker of the Iowa House.
The headline reads: “Pat Grassley to head rural House leaders.”
The online version of the same article has an appropriate headline that reads, “Iowa Republicans select Rep. Pat Grassley to be new House Speaker when Legislature returns in January.”
That’s a normal, albeit, long headline. You can read the headline and ascertain what happened.
With the print edition, one is left scratching his or her head. First, what is he leading? A caucus of rural legislators in the Iowa House? Second, is he just leading the leaders?
Or is this to imply that he only represents rural Iowa being a farmer from New Hartford and is somehow out-of-touch with the rest of Iowa?
Since I can’t get inside the head of the headline writer, I don’t know for sure why the headline was written this way.
