A very interesting article, gives us an insight of how a news report can mislead the public:

On Thursday morning, the Washington Post published a piece with an explosive headline: “The State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.” The piece alleged that Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy, one of the top officials the department, and three of his deputies had left their jobs because they didn’t want to serve in the Trump administration.
“The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior foreign service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era,” Josh Rogin, the story’s author, wrote.
There was certainly an element of truth to the report: Kennedy and those three deputies had indeed left the department. And the story went viral almost immediately. According to Ishaan Tharoor, a foreign affairs writer for the Post, the story was “breaking” Chartbeat, a tool used by news websites to take stock of traffic. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said on Twitter.
But as the day went on, key elements of the article came into question.
For one, the initial headline was misleading — the word “management” strongly implied that all of America’s top diplomats were resigning, which was not the case. For another, Kennedy’s “entire” team hadn’t left when the story was posted, a point that became clear after simply taking a look at State’s organizational chart.
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Critics inside and outside of the State Department also pushed back hard against the story’s most explosive suggestion — that Kennedy and his deputies were choosing to leave as part of a “mass exodus” of officials opposed to Trump.
The State Department said that the four officials had submitted their resignations at the start of the new administration, as is standard practice with all political appointees throughout the executive branch of the government. Reporters who have covered the State Department for years said the Post report was overstating a normal feature of a transition. The American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), a sort of union for foreign service officers, also stepped into the fray, releasing an unusual public statement that said the entire thing was overblown.
“I don’t think the sky is falling,” Barbara Stephenson, the president of AFSA, told me in a subsequent email. “Rotations and retirements are facts of life in the Foreign Service—they’re how we refresh the ranks and steadily produce a deep bench ready to step in and lead.”
By the end of the day, the Washington Post had changed its headline to “the State Department’s entire senior administrative team just resigned,” though it included no editor’s note explaining the new language. Rogin, the piece’s author, told me he stands by his reporting.
The bottom line, though, is that the story as written — and as described by its initial headline — gives a misleading impression of what happened at the State Department and why.
Some senior officials did leave, but it was a relatively small slice of the department’s top brass. They did resign, but as part of the standard routine when new administrations take office. The Trump team did let the four officials know that their resignations were going to be accepted, but that’s the normal prerogative of any incoming White House.
It’s also important to note that the most prominent of the departing officials, Kennedy, was a deeply controversial figure tied to both Benghazi and the lingering scandal over Hillary Clinton’s email server. This was not necessarily a white knight shoved out the door by dastardly Trump administration officials.
Taken together, it’s reminder that Trump’s chaotic approach to governance means we need to be more, and not less, careful about understanding what’s actually a nefarious move by a vengeful and unpredictable new administration — and what’s actually just business as usual for a new White House.

Read the rest of the article here: vox.com