Headline Foolishness

I saw this headline earlier today, and found it irritatingly foolish:

Court Holds Secret Vote on Health Care

It makes it sound like the justices were in some sort of secret conspiracy to do whatever they’re going to do to the health care law. The article went out over the news syndicates, and it appeared on a number of sites, usually with the same headline.

In fact, though, it was just their normal Friday conference where they discuss, in private,  the cases they’ve heard during oral arguments over the week, and once you read the article, it made that clear, and also had a fairly accurate description of the decision process. More accurate headlines would have used “tentative” or “private” to describe the conference today, since the eventual vote will become public, but of course,  that doesn’t sound as sinister.