In our information-dense world, we don’t read, we scan. if I receive an e-mail newsletter, it might contain a dozen headlines. if the headline writer is good, I might only click on one or two of the stories to see what it’s all about. But anyone in the e-mail marketing business can tell you that most people are too busy to click through. They scan the headlines and then move on.

So what happens when one of those headlines is misleading or just plain wrong? A perfect example appeared in a ZDNet e-mail I received this morning.[*] One headline read as follows:

Why we banned Windows Vista

Clicking through to the article itself reveals a subtle difference in the headline:

Why we ‘banned’ Windows Vista

Huh? Why the scare quotes around that word? Maybe because the National Institute for Standards and Technology didn’t ban anything? From the story itself  (emphasis added):

Simon Szykman, chief information officer at NIST, was slightly irked by some of the media reports on his agency’s move, which painted the ban as a major slap in Microsoft’s face. In fact, Szykman said, this is business as usual. Ultimately, NIST expects many of its PCs will run Vista.

Direct quote from the interview:

Q: What is your current position on Windows Vista?
Szykman: Our policy states that we’re not allowing users to install or deploy Windows Vista for the time being. We consider this to be an interim policy to give us the time to do the adequate testing of Vista before we deploy it. We don’t expect to have any obstacles that would prevent us from eventually deploying Vista.

So what happened to the truth? Let’s review. The original story, which was widely circulated, created the impression that an influential government agency – one that publishes the National Vulnerability Database of computer security issues – had found serious flaws in Windows Vista. The reality, it turns out, is that they were doing what just about every business and government agency is doing, which is to block deployment of a new operating system until it can be fully tested.

So ZDNet’s many subscribers open their e-mail newsletter today and see a headline for a follow-up story on this issue. That headline seems to confirm that the original story was true. Those who don’t click through and read the story will never notice that the headline is factually incorrect. Instead, they’ll file away another small bit of (incorrect) data that reinforces the original (incorrect) story.

A better headline might have been:

“We didn’t ‘ban’ Vista,” NIST chief says

Meanwhile, no correction on this story.

[*] Full disclosure: I write for ZDNet, but I have no influence over its news coverage, and I certainly don’t agree with every editorial decision that appears on its pages.