That's not equivalent at all. The dreadlocks story is a legitimately outrageous and racist attack. It's not journalistic ethics to write stories like a robot. The context is important. The NY Times headline includes relevant details to inform the reader. "Kids Cut Another Kid's Hair" just sounds like juvenile hijinks and isn't doing justice to the story.
The Daily Mail will actively gin up uninteresting or patently false stories with the hottest headlines they can possibly get away with. They'll skip coverage of important news if they can find a story about a prominent person misspeaking about something inconsequential. Look at the lawsuit. They were upset that publishing multiple stories a day about Piers Morgan weren't all getting top search ranking. The world doesn't need multiple stories per day about Piers Morgan any more than it needs multiple stories about celebrity bikini bodies like what's on their front page right now. DM is fluff, it's pandering, it has no redeeming value.
> "Kids Cut Another Kid's Hair" just sounds like juvenile hijinks and isn't doing justice to the story.
The alternative take is that story pretty much is just juvenile hijinks, and the NYT is pretty much ginning up a story. A lot of the kids I knew in school were horrible to each other and nobody wrote an article about them.
Most print journalism has gone to the gutter these days, the NYT isn't a respectable institution. There is a bunch of stuff on the internet that is more reliable.
But it is juvenile hijinks, and did turn out to be patently false.
> The NY Times headline includes relevant details to inform the reader.
Lets see which details were no longer relevant once the story turned out to be false, and the Times (to their credit, unlike the Mail) changed the headline to reflect that:
The Daily Mail will actively gin up uninteresting or patently false stories with the hottest headlines they can possibly get away with. They'll skip coverage of important news if they can find a story about a prominent person misspeaking about something inconsequential. Look at the lawsuit. They were upset that publishing multiple stories a day about Piers Morgan weren't all getting top search ranking. The world doesn't need multiple stories per day about Piers Morgan any more than it needs multiple stories about celebrity bikini bodies like what's on their front page right now. DM is fluff, it's pandering, it has no redeeming value.