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Let's face it, most of us don't have much time to read. If you get your morning headlines on Drudge or Yahoo! News, you almost certainly don't devour every word of every link. You browse headlines, you skim stories, you get the gist of what's going on in the world.

For that reason, journalism schools teach writers to format articles like a backwards version of an M. Night Shyamalan movie: The only part worth seeing comes first. So, you have the headline which is written to grab you, even if it's mildly confusing (see "US Court Rules 'Zombies Have Free Speech Rights'"). And after that comes the first sentence or lede, which summarizes all the important facts of the story that follows ("A court has allowed a group of protesters dressed as zombies to continue with a lawsuit against police who arrested them for disorderly conduct.")



When there is no more room in hell, the protestors will walk the Earth.

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As the story goes on, the information supplied becomes steadily less and less important, a style some call the "inverted pyramid." They used to do this for stories appearing in physical newspapers where space was limited, because editors know it's safe to cut from the end without losing anything crucial.

That's the way it's supposed to work, anyway.

How Can This Be Used For Evil?

Obviously if you're a reporter and you have a certain bias one way or the other, the method is simple: Just make sure that whatever facts contradict your point are buried. Nobody can claim you left the facts out, yet you know that most of the readers won't see them.