A headline is a verdict delivered before the trial. Eight words across the top of a page and the reader has already decided. The headline does not inform. The headline instructs. The headline says this is what happened and here is what you should think about it and if you read the article underneath you will find that the article sometimes disagrees with the headline but nobody reads the article. Everybody reads the headline. The headline is the only journalism most people consume.

The Detroit News called me a dope fiend. That was the headline. Not poet. Not activist. Not musician. Not husband. Dope fiend. Two words and I was defined for every person in Michigan who read the morning paper and did not turn to page six. The headline put me in a box before the judge put me in a cell. The headline was the first sentence. The courtroom was the second.

The New York Times covered the Black Panther Party like a weather report for a hurricane. Dangerous. Militant. Armed. The headlines never said free breakfast program for children. The headlines never said free health clinic. The headlines never said community organization. The headlines said guns. The headlines said radical. The headlines said threat. Fred Hampton fed more children breakfast than the city of Chicago did and his headline was killed in police raid. That was his headline. Not the breakfast. Not the children. The raid. The headline picks the frame and the frame becomes the picture and the picture becomes the history and the history is wrong because the headline was wrong and nobody went back to fix it.

They called Billie Holiday a junkie. That was her headline for thirty years. Not the greatest jazz vocalist who ever lived. Not the woman who sang Strange Fruit when nobody else would sing it. Junkie. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics put Harry Anslinger on her case and Anslinger hounded her until she died in a hospital bed handcuffed to the rail. Her headline in death was the same as her headline in life. Junkie jazz singer dies. The music was not in the headline. The music was never in the headline.

They called Lenny Bruce obscene. That was the headline every time he was arrested which was constantly. Obscene comic arrested. Obscene comic convicted. The obscenity was that he told the truth on a stage and the truth had words in it that the newspaper would not print. The newspaper that would not print the words put them in a headline. Obscene. The word obscene was the headline. The actual words were underneath where nobody looked.

Dewey Defeats Truman. The most famous wrong headline in American history. The Chicago Tribune printed it because they had a deadline and the deadline was more important than the truth. That is every headline. The deadline is more important than the truth. The press does not have time to be right. The press has time to be first. First and wrong beats second and right every day of the week in the newspaper business. The headline is not a fact. The headline is a bet. The newspaper bets that this is what happened and prints it and if they are wrong they print a correction on page fourteen that nobody reads.

I published my own newspaper. The Fifth Estate in Detroit. The Ann Arbor Sun. I published them because the headline in somebody else's paper will always be somebody else's verdict. The only way to control the headline is to own the press. The only way to own the press is to build one. We built one. It was small and it was broke and the ink got on your hands and the headline was ours.