https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2025/04/07/two-part-headline-always-wrong/
A while back, I wrote about the growing tendency for economic journalists in establishment media to link economic news to the weather. Poor sales over a quarter might be blamed on more rainfall than usual, while improved sales might be linked to a warm spell. The aim always being to put a positive spin on economic news which might otherwise be more alarming.

These “X caused by weather” headlines though, might be just a subset of a wider issue with economic journalism… that, for the most part, establishment media are largely clueless when it comes to understanding the economy. As James Medway at the Guardian explained a couple of years ago:

“How different might the last decade of British politics have been if the public had been better informed about economics? It’s the inescapable thought I had when reading through the BBC’s newly published ‘thematic review’ into its coverage of ‘taxation, public spending, government borrowing and debt output’…

“The review does not hold back. Independent experts Andrew Dilnot and Michael Blastland state clearly that ‘too many’ BBC journalists lack an understanding of ‘basic economics.’ This particularly affects reporting on the central political issue of government debt, with ‘some journalists’ apparently ‘instinctively’ believing all debt to be inherently bad – and therefore failing to appreciate that the role of government debt is ‘contested and contestable.’”

Adding to the problem, no doubt, is the pressure of the 24-hour news cycle and the emphasis on speed rather than accuracy… the satirical journal Private Eye using the character Phil Space to highlight establishment media’s need to fill pages asap. But there is also the question of authority in news. It is not enough to report economic data… to demonstrate authority, a reporter must offer a plausible cause. For example, this morning Pedro Goncalves at Yahoo! Finance reports that:

“UK house prices fall by £1,575 in March as stamp duty holiday ends.”

The story is merely a rehashing of the Halifax press release. But note that it comes in two parts which we might call “data” and “speculation.” The data is that the average house price fell last month. The speculation is that it was caused by the looming end of relief on stamp duty (an ancient tax levied on the sale of property in the UK). Unfortunately, Halifax has form when it comes to misinterpreting house price data. Last year, when the average house price rose, Halifax maintained that it was because more people were buying houses, when, in fact, far fewer first-time buyers were able to get mortgages, so that most house sales were at the high end of the market (where prices are higher). A falling average house price might be due to people rushing to finalise their purchases before the April deadline. But it might also be down to a simple fall in house sales, particularly at the upper end of the market.

This was just one of the two-part headlines from today’s news. Earlier we were told that “Pound edges up as investors abandon dollar hit by trade war.” The irony here being that within minutes of posting the headline, the pound continued its fall from a recent high of 1.389 to 1.273 at the time of writing. There was likely some wishful thinking in the headline too, as establishment media across the western states seek to portray Trump’s tariffs as a catastrophe (as, indeed, they may turn out to be). Currency markets though, are blown on so many winds – ill and fair – that only an idiot would seek to link them to anything.

What we seem to have here is something akin to Betteridge’s law of headlines… that “any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” This is simply because in any case where the facts were clear they would be stated. For example, instead of “Is the world heading into recession?” the headline would be “The world is heading into recession.” (Indeed, it may prove more correct – but we will only find out six months from now – that “The world is already in recession”).

A second Betteridge Law of headlines might say that “any two-part economics headline that links data to a contemporaneous cause is wrong!” Simply because all economic trends are years and more often decades in the making.