Meow, I'm going to get catty here.
You'd think that yesterday was a slow news day or something. I guess the report on how the H1N1 (swine) flu virus resembles the 1918 Spanish flu virus wasn't significant enough to warrant much coverage or analysis (that may be the topic of another blog post!). You see, this headline hit the top of Yahoo's Most Popular page, and prompted more than 20,000 people to e-mail it to a friend:
Twenty thousand people--a small town's worth!--were intrigued enough by this story to pass it on. The header sure makes it sound like the basis for a sci-fi movie, doesn't it? Personally, it made me envision a bunch of zombie-like people under a spell, shuffling to the grocery store for fresh salmon, per the request of their anthropomorphic felines, who greeted them upon their return with a "Mrrrow. What took you so long?" (Ok, watching Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video may have influenced my imagination a bit. But still.)
The headline nagged at me. The story sounded vaguely familiar. Hmm, I thought, thinking of how I had noticed at work just the day before that another study had come out about cat/human interactions. But that one had the much more mundane headline of "How Cats Get Food Bowl Filled." Zzzzz.
Could it be a coincidence that there was yet another story out on cat research so soon? Or, were they the same story, but with dramatically different headlines--one of which that was written to "pimp for clicks," or grab the attention of readers, despite not being very newsworthy?
Sadly, the latter was the case. The Yahoo headline sure souped up the story to sound more interesting than it really was. The research, published in Current Biology, essentially stated that cats change the tone of their purrs or meows to communicate different needs.
In a purr-fect world, news outlets would pay more attention to news that truly affects people, and not waste the public's time with overwrought headlines for stories on inconsequential topics.
Photo of kitten by Ian Britton, courtesy of freefoto.com.
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