PoliticalDUAL-USE

Burying the Lede

What it is

Placing the most important or damaging fact deep in a document, speech, or release — after reassuring material, in a subordinate clause, in paragraph fourteen — so that audiences who read only the opening take away the wrong story.

How it works

Most readers stop early. Gabielkov and colleagues (2016) found that roughly six in ten links shared on Twitter were never clicked. Journalism's inverted pyramid exists to serve that reader: the lede carries what matters. Burying the lede inverts the pyramid on purpose. A company leads its earnings release with adjusted growth and discloses the regulatory investigation on page eight; a government summary opens with the findings that exonerate and reaches the findings that do not in a later section; a speech condemns in general terms before conceding in specific ones. The mechanism is the primacy effect and the headline effect — Ecker and colleagues (2014) showed that a misleading headline shapes memory of an article even when the body corrects it — combined with the discloser's ability to say, accurately, that everything was in the document. The technique differs from omission because nothing is omitted; the reader is simply steered past it. The tell is structure that does not match importance: the paragraph a lawyer would flag is the one the layout hides.

Real-world examples

  • •Laurel Leff's Buried by the Times (2005) documented how the New York Times reported the Holocaust during the war largely in short items on inside pages, so that the paper's own record shows the facts were published and almost never made prominent.
  • •The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission updated its guidance in May 2016 to require that GAAP figures appear with equal or greater prominence than adjusted non-GAAP figures in earnings releases, a direct response to companies leading with flattering numbers and burying the reported loss.
  • •Attorney General William Barr's four-page letter of March 24, 2019 led with the finding that the Mueller investigation did not establish a conspiracy with Russia; Robert Mueller wrote to Barr three days later that the letter did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of his report, whose obstruction findings the public did not see for another three weeks.
  • •The Department of Health and Human Services' first enrollment report for the Affordable Care Act in November 2013 led with roughly 106,000 people who had selected plans across all marketplaces; the figure for the troubled federal HealthCare.gov site, about 27,000, appeared further down and became the story once reporters reached it.

Ethical guidelines

Where the line is

Ordering material for narrative effect is ordinary craft when the audience will reach the conclusion; the line is crossed when a writer knows most readers will stop early and places the material fact where they will not reach it, so that the document can be cited as disclosure while functioning as concealment.

  • ●Structure is a claim about importance; placing a material fact where readers will not reach it is a misrepresentation even though the fact is present.
  • ●Summaries of long reports should lead with what the report's author would lead with, not with what the summarizer prefers.
  • ●Narrative order that builds toward a conclusion is legitimate craft when the audience will reach the conclusion; it becomes burial when the writer knows most will not.

How to defend against it

  • ►Read the last third first: for press releases, reports, and earnings statements, skip to the sections labeled risks, limitations, legal proceedings, or notes before reading the opening.
  • ►Search rather than read — open the document and search for terms such as investigation, decline, loss, unable, did not, and except, which is where buried material tends to live.
  • ►Compare the summary to the full document on a single specific: pick the most consequential number or finding and check where each version places it.
  • ►When a spokesperson says it was all in the release, ask which paragraph, and note the answer; page numbers are a measure of intent.
  • ►For your own writing, apply the inverted pyramid honestly: if the audience read only your first sentence, would they know the most important thing? If not, rewrite.

From the Defense Playbook

Read Past the Headlineminutes

Open and read the piece before you react to it or pass it on, because headlines are written to be clicked and shared, routinely claim more than the article supports, and shape what you remember even after you have read the correction in paragraph six.

Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.

References

  1. Ecker, U. K. H., Lewandowsky, S., Chang, E. P., & Pillai, R. (2014). The effects of subtle misinformation in news headlines. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 20(4), 323–335
    A misleading headline shapes memory and inference even when the article body corrects it.
  2. Gabielkov, M., Ramachandran, A., Chaintreau, A., & Legout, A. (2016). Social Clicks: What and Who Gets Read on Twitter?. Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS 2016
    Roughly six in ten shared links were never clicked — readers act on headlines without reading bodies.
  3. Leff, L. (2005). Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper. Cambridge University Press
    The historical case of facts published but placed where few readers would encounter them.
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