Something that I have observed over the many years of contact with various daily newspapers – Malayalam and English dailies in India: headlines containing metaphorical usage of words that define physical attack/abuse/violence such as “thrashed”, “whipped”, “muzzled”, “slapped”, “hit”, “handcuffed” and more such.
Research questions:
- What percentage of headlines in a day’s newspaper contain at least one word that stands for physical violence but which is used metaphorically in the headline?
- How does this measurement compare between newspapers from different countries and regions?
- Are there common links between them?
- How much of it (words referring to physical violence) is used in the context of individual-individual relations (issues between two individual parties) and individual-systems relations (issues involving governmental entities or corporate entities)?
- What would be some simple, factual, emotionally-neutral re-writings of those headlines?
- Can the neutral headlines be further made compassionate, non-startling and gentle?
- If made gentler and compassionate, how does the efficacy of the headlines change with regards to the basic journalistic goal “to inform”?
- Why is shock and inflation or stoking of fear used as the emotional carriage for news? What effect can this exposure to normalized shock and fear have on humans?
- Can/how does this affect the human nervous system – which regulates physiological health?
- Can a change in how news is written lead to favorable outcomes in human health?
Additional questions
- What percentage of journalists know about nervous system health of human beings?
- Do they know words and stories impact the psyche of readers?
- When they use words that refer to physical might and violence, how aware are they about the psychological+neurological+gut-brain-axis impact on the end-reader?
- Are the journalists taught to care for the well-being of its readers through the words they use, the emotions they trigger?