You might have seen a recent headline warning of the dangers of dealing with unscrupulous property vendors: "Stephen lost his entire $98,500 house deposit because of a small mistake... and Aussies are fuming." Sounds rough, right? The vendor sounds ruthless. Other people are fuming. The system's broken.
The headline fits with a narrative that already seems familiar; buying a home in Australia is bloody hard. A lot of people are priced out of the market. And if you’ve bought before yourself, you know that banks don’t work on anyone else's timeline but their own. “Ooof..” you think, “that could have been me”. Lucky it wasn’t.
You don’t read the article; who has time for that? You've got the story now, and it fits a familiar narrative.
Then someone mentions there's more to it.
In 2024, Stephen Evans tried to buy a property from Yea Lan Jan in Queensland. He couldn't pay the full $98,500 deposit on time, so he paid in instalments over two days instead, without seeking to change the contract. The real estate agent told him this would be fine, but didn’t check that with the vendor, and didn’t have permission to grant the extension. When Jan terminated the contract and offered Evans the deposit back, they were well within their rights to do so. But Evans took Jan to court instead to force the sale. The court sided with Jan. Awarded costs. The agent, it turned out, had no authority to change the contract terms.
The headline isn’t wrong exactly: "Stephen lost his entire $98,500 house deposit because of a small mistake... and Aussies are fuming" That's not wrong, exactly. But it's not what exactly happened, either. The story that reached you first—the one about a greedy vendor—that shaped your opinion before the actual facts did.
But this isn't a story about real estate. It's a story about headlines. About how they frame reality, and what they leave out. About what you think is true before you've actually read much at all.
scrolling headline news
I’ll admit that I get most of my news from reading headlines. Often on Reddit. Sometimes on news sites. If I’m unfortunate enough to encounter the nightly news on a commercial station I’m no better informed than a scroll of the Daily Mail.
Every headline or brief news summary is a frame. An editor has made a choice about what to emphasise, what to bury, and which emotion to trigger. You’re presented with a particular angle on a story; a hook. Certain details are deemed more important than others. The same facts can be framed as a tragedy, an injustice, a cautionary tale, or a triumph, depending on which angle is chosen. The frame isn't the story itself; it's the lens through which you're invited to understand it. And that lens shapes what you notice, what you feel, and what you believe matters about what happened.
These frames shape how we see the world. They accumulate over time, and in a world of headlines that are increasingly alarmed…well, so are we.
are editors evil?
Probably not. But they’re incentivised to optimise headlines for engagement over accuracy. A nuanced story doesn't get clicks. "Local home buyer loses everything" does. When news revenue is driven by ad impressions, the system is working exactly as it's designed.
Once you see a story one way—vendor's cold heart, system's broken—it's harder to see it differently. It’s not that you’re incapable of seeking out the detail to understand the nuance, but really, who has time for that? Picking up news from headlines is a symptom of being a distracted human in our digital world. Our brains work by pattern-matching: the headline provides the pattern and everything else slots in behind it.
But the cumulative effect of thousands of slightly distorted frames is reshaping how we understand each other, how we disagree, and whether we can bridge those differences at all.
attention is currency
Every platform, every publisher, every app monetises user attention through advertising. The metrics that matter economically have nothing to do with accuracy or readers being informed. It’s eyeballs. Page views, unique visitors, daily active users, and ad impressions (if not clicks).
With our primitive brains wired for threat, we're tuned to notice danger, conflict, and surprise. A headline that says "Polyamines take different paths in healthy cells versus cancer cells" doesn't trigger the same neurological response as "Popular anti-aging supplement promotes cancer growth". We're not stupid; we're operating on survival instincts in an information environment that exploits them.
Social media platforms prioritise content based on engagement, so it isn’t difficult to see how algorithms reward outrage. A conflict-framed headline gets more shares, more comments, more dwell time than one that is thoughtful and balanced.
Scrolling might seem like a bit of ‘me time’, but these platforms aren't there for you. They’re there for profit. So from Meta’s perspective, it doesn’t matter that the stories that generate clicks are not what help you and your neighbours become more informed about the world around you. These headlines do not promote nuance and understanding, and they do not support rational or democratic decision making. The system is optimised for engagement; that’s how attention economics work.
choose your tribe
The way a headline is framed shapes what you notice. A single word choice can shift how you interpret identical information: call it a "carbon tax" or an "emission fee", "asylum seeker" or "illegal immigrant". The accompanying image choice emphasises the frame further, and it does the work before you click.
Research from Ball State University in the US shows how much the news source influences our propensity to believe a news headline. When given a choice between a believable headline from a source that was distrusted by the study participant, and a less believable headline from a source they did trust, people chose the trusted source. Democratic voters trusted CNN so much that 90% selected a CNN headline over a Fox News one, regardless of content quality. Republican voters showed the inverse pattern with Fox News. The frame influenced by the outlet delivering the news mattered more than what was being said.
I have to say that I’m not surprised though. Think about the barrage of information that comes your way every day. Even if it was your full-time job to consume news media each day, what proportion do you think you could accurately comprehend? Online we have access to news content from traditional and new media sources across the world. It’s impossible to take each new piece purely at face value. Our brain takes what it thinks we already know, matching new information against years of patterns we’ve come to understand, making a judgement and moving on. It has to, or we’d be paralysed by analysis. And it is important to eat and sleep sometimes.
Frames shape how we understand the media we consume. Algorithms analyse what we dwell on, what we click, and what we share, and show us more of that. There’s a snowball effect that accumulates until we feel like the whole world feels a particular way about something. Until we encounter a different view that seems diametrically opposed…
We’re being polarised into camps that are based on different frames rather than different interpretations of fact. How do you find common ground when you’re both arguing a version of reality that didn’t necessarily happen?
so what now?
Once you see how headlines work, you have an opportunity to start reading differently. Maybe this changes what you share, what you argue about, and how you respond to people who read different headlines.
Next time you scroll, consider what’s been left out of the frames you’re seeing. “Tech boss uses ChatGPT to create cancer vaccine to save dying dog" could also have been “Scientists at UNSW develop personalised canine cancer treatment." That's also true. Different frame. Same story.
The frame becomes clearer when you start noticing who benefits from the narrative you read. If you feel like ‘Be Alarmed, Not Alert’ could be your screensaver, you aren’t alone. The platforms we visit and the outlets we read want repeat eyeballs. They want us to feel like we’re missing something when we aren’t there.
And if you feel confused or that something's missing, you're probably noticing the lack of nuance. Most headlines, whether via space limitations or design, don’t accommodate complexity.
If there’s anything to take away from this story it’s that headlines are designed as a hook, and to take them at face value is a missed opportunity to understand the nuance and complexity of the real story. We should notice when we're defending versions of reality that didn't happen. And listen to people differently when we realise we might be reading different stories about the same world.
It's not hopeless. It's just different once you see it.
further reading
Stephen lost his entire $98,500 house deposit because of a small mistake... and Aussies are fuming by Kylie Stevens, Daily Mail
The Daily Mail article featuring the home buyer who lost his home deposit when he failed to pay as per the contract.
Evans v Jan[2025] QSC 31 published by Queensland Judgements
The ruling handed down by the Supreme Court of Queensland in the case of Evans v Jan.
The Power of Framing: How News Headlines Guide Search Behavior by Poudel, Milkowski, and Weninger, University of Notre Dame
A University of Notre Dame study that found that headline framing in Google search results significantly shaped follow-up searches.
Popular Anti-Aging Supplement May Fuel Cancer Growth by David Nield, Science Alert
An article from Science Alert sharing that a team from Tokyo University of Science have found that polyamines speed the growth of cancer cells, yet managing to insinuate that a popular supplement may cause cancer.
Believing false political headlines and discrediting truthful political headlines: The interaction between news source trust and news content expectancy by Robin Blom
The research paper that reported the polarising impact of news sources on the believability of headlines.
Tech boss uses ChatGPT to create cancer vaccine to save dying dog by Natasha Bita, The Australian
The reporting provided by The Australian on the dog owner who sought a treatment for his pet, proving that the once highly respected broadsheet is not beyond adding to the clickbait noise.