Are Headlines Dooming Bernie Sanders’ Campaign?
Bernie Sanders has a headline problem. Although the presidential hopeful continues to raise money and climb the polls, much of the journalistic rhetoric surrounding Sanders concerns his seemingly preordained failure.
An article titled “Why Bernie Sanders Can’t Win”, for example, recently ran on The Daily Banter. Then there’s “He Won’t Win, So Why Is Bernie Sanders Running?” in Newsweek, “Why Bernie Sanders, Like Eugene McCarthy, Will Fail” in The Moderate Voice, and “Bernie Sanders: Why the guy who won’t win matters” in the Los Angeles Times. These headlines seem to come even as a Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll released Monday shows him only trailing the “presumptive” nominee Hillary Clinton by 7 points.
The irony is that while many journalists are using doomy headlines, the articles themselves tend to be optimistic. But because of how the headlines are worded, that optimism may not translate to readers. According to a study published by the Journal of Experimental Psychology, a misleading headline can cause readers to remember the details in line with the headline better than those that weren’t.
For example, in the Newsweek piece, Ben Railton compares Sanders to other presidential long shots, such as Shirley Chisholm and Jesse Jackson, who “redefined, for a time, campaigns and the presidency and even politics themselves as far beyond partisanship.”
It’s an encouraging message — and one of the piece’s biggest takeaways — but as it follows such a defeatist headline, readers may come away pessimistic rather than inspired.
Compounding this problem is the fact that 6 out of 10 people only read an article’s headline. Rather than just drawing attention to the story, for over 50 percent of people the headline is the story — so even if the story itself is positive, the takeaway will be “Sanders won’t win.”
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/09/01/3697644/bernie-sanders-science-self-fulfilling-prophecy/
= new reply since forum marked as read
but they won't succeed. Bernie is strong and way beyond headlines in his appeal. 
