Digital Chum - Virtual fish guts and other nonsense

March 14th, 2011:

Let’s play a game!

Here’s a quick sampling of headlines from six major news sites, which include MSNBC, Fox, MSN, BBC, New York Times, and CNN. Each headline was  the main headline on the front page of the news agency’s website at around 1:30 PM on Monday, March 14th, 2011.

Here’s the game. Read the six headlines and guess which one is Fox News.

Searching for survivors

URGENT: Nuke Meltdown in 3 Reactors

Uranium rods ‘highly likely’ melting at Japanese nuclear plant, official says

Fuel Rod Crisis Fears at 3rd Reactor

Japan Nuclear Plant Hit By Second Blast

Meltdown alert at Japan reactor

I’m not going to give away the answer (especially since every person I’ve asked has easily gotten the answer right), but this game can be played any time of day on any day of the year… and it’s almost always a simple task to pick out the Fox News headline.

When headlines are simply more sensationalist on one news site, I find it amusing. When they’re misleading, I find it disturbing, regardless of the news organization.

Either way, it’s an easy game to play… and it’s almost always easy to spot Fox headlines.