The headline on the website Wired reads:

“Colonel Kicked Out of Afghanistan for Anti-PowerPoint Rant”

Slate picked up the story and gave it a slightly different spin in its headline, taking its cue from Wired:

“Colonel Fired for Hating PowerPoint”

These are provocative headlines, raising issues about the First Amendment, a fanatic insistence on conformity in the military, and even dark conspiracies involving the U.S. Army and Microsoft. However, they are completely and intentionally misleading. The colonel was not fired for hating PowerPoint, and he didn’t go on any “anti-PowerPoint rant.” Here is what really happened, in Wired’s own words:

“…Army Col. Lawrence Sellin, a 61-year old reservist from New Jersey who served in Afghanistan and Iraq prior to this deployment, got the sack Thursday from his job as a staff officer at the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command in Kabul. The hammer fell barely 48 hours after United Press International ran a passionate op-ed he wrote to lament that “little of substance is really done here”…The colonel’s rant called into question whether ISAF’s revamped command structure, charged with coordinating the day-by-day war effort, was much more than a briefing factory. Or, as Sellin put it, “endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information.” According to Sellin, when his commanding general (whom he doesn’t want to name) saw that Sellin described IJC as a blinkered bureaucracy, he informed the colonel that it was time to pack his things. “He was very polite and shook my hand and wished me luck,” Sellin says.

A spokesman for the command cited the specific regulation that sealed Sellin’s fate:  NATO Directive (95-1); failure to clear “written or oral presentations to the media” through a designated public-affairs officer. “His comments do not reflect the reality of the work done every day at IJC,”  says its director of public affairs, Colonel Hans Bush. “His insights are his own, however, his duty position and responsibilities did not offer him the situational awareness needed to validate his postings to the media.”

Colonel Selin’s sacking had nothing to do with PowerPoint whatsoever! He was sacked for publishing an unauthorized editorial and criticizing his superiors. Wired and Slate knew that, and still put out completely misleading—misleading, hell: false—headlines suggesting otherwise, to attract readers.

When the technique of using provocative headlines to get attention metastasizes into outright fabrication, it’s time to blow the whistle. This is intentionally misleading readers and creating disinformation, as unethical a journalistic practice as there is. How many people, quickly perusing Slate’s e-mail summaries of the day’s news, will  read only the headline and inform a dinner companion, “Did you hear about the colonel in Afghanistan who got fired for saying bad things about PowerPoint?” And a rumor begins.

Cute headlines, shocking headlines, hyping headlines and inaccurate headlines are now becoming dishonest headlines. It has to stop. This story wasn’t even newsworthy: an obscure colonel gets fired for breaking a rule—so what? Ah, but once the fake headline turned this yawner into a wacky story about an officer’s rant against technology, it was a scoop. This technique gives the term “headline news” a new and unfortunate spin.

Note to the media: Headline lies are still lies. Cut it out.