Last week while cruising through Turkish news websites I came across a headline of a news article that made me stop. As I saw it later via a friend's complaint, I thought about it some more, and instead of dismissing it as an individual person's error and decided to cover it in this week's article.

First let's take a look at the headline: "Three youngsters in a luxury car dead."

You probably noticed the problem but let me summarize the news article itself in order to give full disclosure:

Apparently four young people were in a "luxury" car, and while cruising on the Şile Highway – an outer district of Istanbul – the driver lost control of their vehicle and ran into a truck that was parked on the side of the road. Three of them were declared dead on the scene, and the fourth was taken to a hospital, while the police launched an investigation on whether the truck was parked illegally.

Even though the title fails to state this was result of a car crash – which is the main point of this particular news – editors added very unnecessary information: the car was expensive. Why was this emphasized? Are we supposed to care more or less because the victims were rich? If they were poor, would they still make the news? Well you see where I am going with this. With this colossal mistake, the editor also opened himself or herself up to this kind of questioning. But let's drop it for a bit and actually look at the reason behind this headline.

There is a possible incentive for this. As we see in mainstream TV shows both local and abroad and extensive coverage of the daily lives of those who are famous, the public shows interest in the OC style of living. So the reason can be that the editor publishing the story was fishing for more hits and decided that by stating that the accident had happened to rich people, he would attract more attention. This, to me, is unethical since it patronizes the readers and also leaves out the necessary information that would make this news article more thorough. There is a more important reason this was unethical, but I will mention it at the end of the article.

Well the reason might be hits and it certainly achieved that but not in the way editor intended. The readers weren't as easy to attract as they thought, and there was quite a bit of backlash both in the social media and in the comments section of news websites that used the aforementioned headline.

Before the backlash was evident in the comments section, I first encountered it on social media, as I said before, from a friend of mine no less. Many were furious over the emphasis on the luxury car and how it emptied the tragedy of the loss of three human lives. If anything, the emphasis should have been on the loss of those lives itself, they said.

The comments sections had similar complaints, but there were also other more disturbing comments that said: "Rich kids had it coming, they were probably speeding…" and so on. Thus I come to my main point. With a single mistaken emphasis and unnecessary information, we could easily fuel such comments. If these kinds of remarks are presented continuously, we will only serve to divide people and break dozens of journalistic principles in the process. And this goes both ways too. Similar mistakes are being made with news articles featuring poverty stricken people as well. Also to be fair, these problems are also apparent in magazine sections, but seeing them in a more brutal story only escalates their effects. Nevertheless, if you are still not convinced, forget about the monetary situation. What if the emphasis was on nationality or skin color? What if it were religion – even if the story had nothing to do with it?