Boys and girls, how many of you want to be smart? Go ahead and raise your hands, nice and high!

Great! I see a lot of you want to be smart and that’s wonderful. Those of you who didn’t raise your hands are dismissed to go outside and stage a protest.

We’re going to start by looking at an actual headline from an actual news agency.

Now, smart people have several ‘rules’ that they follow whenever they get new information. The ‘rules’ keep smart people from being manipulated. When people are manipulated, they will do terrible things believing they are ‘good’ and ‘socially just.’ So get out your number 2 pencils and write down these rules for how smart people read headlines.

Headlines are not the whole story.

A headline is intended to catch your attention. It is written in a way that will make you want to stop and read more. Remember that the headline is NOT the whole story. In fact, sometimes the headline has nothing to do with the story!

“Trump supports hospitalized after being stranded in freezing cold at late-night rally,” is NOT the whole story. It’s a summary of one aspect of a much bigger event.

Headlines are bias.

Every headline you read is just one person’s opinion of what’s important. Headlines focus on some facts and completely ignore others. This is called, ‘bias.’ Everybody is bias. Everybody thinks some facts are more important than others. Smart people remember this when they read headlines.

Our example headline is bias. It focuses on the fact that some people at a Trump rally were hospitalized because they stood in the cold waiting for transportation. There were hundreds of other things that happened at Trump’s rally but a headline can only tell us about ONE of those things.

Headlines create emotions.

Headlines are designed to make you feel things. Does our example headline make you feel good or bad? It makes you feel bad, doesn’t it.

The headline attaches “Donald Trump” to words that usually make us feel bad:

• hospitalized – We think of ‘sickness’ and ‘death.’
• stranded – We think of ‘abandonment’ and ‘loneliness.’
• freezing – The opposite of ‘warmth’ and ‘comfortable.’
• cold – Nobody likes feeling ‘cold.’
• late-night – Night is associated with ‘darkness’ and ‘fear.’

According to the article, there were thousands of people in the crowd and only 7 of them went to the hospital.

The headline could been written: “Thousands Happy of Trump Supporters Brave Freezing Temperatures At Rally” But the author’s bias created a negative headline. The headline focused on cold and darkness rather than upbeat political enthusiasm.

Headlines are sometimes misleading.

When you read our example headline, you might think Donald Trump caused a bunch of people to go to the hospital. But smart people remember that a headline is a tiny piece of the whole story.

The headline puts Donald Trump and “hospitalized people” in the same sentence which makes you think they are closely related. That is misleading. The article is mostly about traffic problems. Thousands of people leaving the event created a traffic jam. A handful of the people got cold while waiting for buses to pick them up. That was not Donald Trump’s fault.

Headlines are sometimes wrong.

Smart people read things and ask one question, “Is this true?” They don’t spend time thinking about things that are not true. As soon as smart people discover untrue things, they move on.

It is a bad idea to become emotionally attached to things that aren’t true. For example, “Donald Trump deserves hatred,” is an untrue statement. Believing it causes people to do all kinds of wicked things and believe those things are “good.” It allows journalists to write misleading headlines about Trump that manipulate your feelings. If you’re not smart, you will join your classmates outside as they destroy their own neighborhoods in ‘protest.’

When you are not smart, you will be manipulated by smart people. You will believe whatever smart people tell you to believe. Remember these rules for reading headlines. They will help protect you from becoming a slave to the whims of smart people.

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BONUS Rule for Smart People

Hatred is always wrong. Stop hating Donald Trump. Hate is not smart. Hate breaks your brain. If you find yourself unable to stop hating Trump, ask God for help.