Cross out the adjectives and see what's left of the headline

Quick answer: Strike every adjective, adverb and fighting verb from a headline. What survives is the claim. How much got struck tells you whether the outlet is selling information or a feeling.

Take a headline and cross out every word that isn't a name, a number or a plain verb. Do it with a pen on a printout if you have to. Some headlines come through nearly untouched. Others collapse into three words and a rumor.

That's the whole method. The rest of this piece is how to use it without fooling yourself.

An invented vote, three headlines

The event below is made up for the exercise. No real board, no real town. A school board votes 5 to 2 to push the high school start time from 7:30 to 8:30.

Version one: School board votes 5-2 to start high school an hour later.

Version two: Tone-deaf board steamrolls working parents with new bell schedule.

Version three: Board finally puts kids' sleep first, ends brutal 7:30 start.

Same vote. Same number. Versions two and three added no facts. They added a verdict, and each one sorted its reader before the first paragraph. Two is writing for the parent who drives a 6:45 shift. Three is writing for the parent who watches a teenager stumble down the stairs.

Neither is lying about the vote. Both are telling you who they think you are.

What a loaded word is doing

A plain word describes. A loaded word instructs. After a while you can sort them into five bins.

• Feeling words. Shocking, chilling, heartbreaking, stunning. The outlet is telling you how to react before you've read the facts that might earn it.
• Fight verbs. Slams, blasts, destroys, torches, shreds. Two people disagreed. The verb turned it into a bout. Swap in "criticizes" and watch the energy leave.
• Certainty words. Proves, exposes, finally, confirms. Check whether the body proves anything or just reports one side's claim.
• Mind-reading words. Secretly, admits, doesn't want you to know. The writer is claiming to know motive. Almost nobody can document that.
• Crowd words. Fans erupt, internet reacts, critics pounce. Often that's three accounts on social media dressed up as a movement.

Notice these cross the aisle with no trouble. "Senator SLAMS" runs the same engine whether the senator is a Republican or a Democrat. Conservatives who enjoy a good takedown headline from their side of the dial are still being worked by it. Being right about the politics doesn't make the verb accurate.

Why the word tells you about the source

Here's the mechanism. The person who wrote the story often didn't write the headline. At many outlets an editor or a social team writes it, and many online outlets try several versions and keep the one that gets the most clicks. That means the headline is a business decision. It's the outlet's guess at what will stop your thumb.

So a steady diet of emotional headlines tells you what the outlet is optimizing for. Not what the reporter found. What the audience rewards. An outlet that needs your anger to keep the lights on will keep finding reasons for you to be angry. That's true of a cable network, a newsletter, a podcast and a guy with a big account.

It also means a bad headline can sit on top of a perfectly decent story. Don't punish the reporter for the copy desk. Read on.

Check the body against the label

Open the story and read the first four paragraphs. Ask three things.

1. Does the body deliver the headline's claim? If the headline says "exposes" and paragraph three says "according to a person familiar with the matter," you've found a gap.
2. Who said the loaded word? If it's inside quotation marks, a source said it and the outlet is reporting it. If the outlet said it in its own voice, that's the outlet's judgment, and the story should show its work.
3. What's the primary source? A bill, a court filing, a transcript, a data table. If the story never links one and never names one, that's information too. Our piece on the four questions an editor asks before a story runs goes deeper on this step.

Try it on a real example from your own feed tonight. Pick one headline that made your pulse jump. Do the strike-through. Read four paragraphs. It takes about three minutes, and the first time you'll probably find the headline carried more than the story did.

Read the front page, not the headline

One headline is an anecdote. Ten are a profile.

Pull up an outlet's homepage and strike through the loaded words on every headline. Count what's left. Some outlets will be almost clean. Some will look like a redacted memo. Do it for a source you trust, and for one you can't stand.

That second half matters. If you only run the test on outlets you already dislike, it isn't a method. It's a team jersey. The honest version is uncomfortable, because your favorites will fail it some days. Notice how an outlet handles it when it gets caught. We covered that in how to tell which outlets actually own their mistakes.

Your feed makes this harder, by the way. It learns which loaded words you click and serves you more of them. How that works, and how to get out of the loop, is in how your feed decides what you see.

Where the test fails

Two places.

Strong words are sometimes earned. If a gunman kills people in a public place, "massacre" may be the plain word. If a report documents years of falsified records, "scandal" can be accurate. The test isn't "emotion bad." It's "does the evidence in the body carry the weight of the word?" When it does, the outlet earned it. When it doesn't, you've just caught a markup.

Calm headlines can mislead too. "Study finds link between X and Y" sounds like a lab coat and still might be a tiny sample, a correlation or a press release. A flat tone isn't a character reference. The method tells you how an outlet is talking to you. It doesn't tell you whether the claim is true. For that, you still have to check the claim.

The habit

Do the strike-through before you share. Not after, when somebody pushes back. Before.

If you can't state the claim in a plain sentence with a name, a number and a verb, you aren't ready to repeat it. Say "I saw a headline that says..." and keep it to that until you've read the thing.

A man who can't be herded by a verb is harder to sell to. That's the point.