It's subtle, but it's absolutely designed to induce feelings of negative emotions to evoke a click. If you'd like to look into this field of study, search up "shadow patterns" or " dark patterns" as that's the modern design language meant for working with data on mass scale in order to drive engagement. (To the down voter, the fact you can't see it is both sad and the point of the design. Unfortunate because it's true. I've sat in these design meetings with software teams and marketing.)

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 5 points 12 hours ago

They don't know she was a single mother. They don't know who she was because they weren't told. The father could have been on a business trip for all we know. That proposed headline injects one plausible guess as to why the baby would have been alone, but without any actual data to back it up.

It also fails to indicate that the baby was alone. You try to imply it by 'single mother', but whose to say that there wasn't someone else in the house that might have been important, like a sibling or extended family member? The detail that the infant was alone was key, but omitted in your version. Of course it's awkward to try to indicate the baby was alone without using the word 'left' in the context of a headline appropriate short sentence.

They could have injected the word "tragically" before dies for a bit more consideration, though people can see that the tragedy is pretty self evident.

[–] jsomae@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

I think that's a worse headline because it doesn't involve the sad imagery of a baby alone for 4 days. "Tragic" is a kitschy word to include in a headline. And neither your headline nor the one in the meme place the mother up-front.

[–] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

As someone else in the comment section pointed out, this death and the infant's precarious situation probably could have been avoided if America's shitty for-profit healthcare system wasn't such a god awful shit show.

The original headline ignores the mother all together to put the focus completely on the child, seeking to engage potential readers with ragebait only to throw cold water on them in the article where they disclose the death of the mother. All in order to completely sidestep any discussion of why exactly a new mother would suddenly die in our country "with the greatest healthcare in the world!"

A statistic that is becoming more and more common.

Edit: there's also an overly heavy focus on dumping praise on the cops, which is ridiculous since they were simply doing their job.

[–] frazw@lemmy.world 7 points 8 hours ago

Well ... Full disclosure. I'm not a journalist