The majority of people read only headlines (but feel free to read the following, if you wish)

Finally, an in-depth article i could sink my teeth into - if i had teeth

The use of a misleading, scare headline illustrated in the previous post got we wondering what percentage of news consumers actually read past the headlines to the story itself. The answer: not many.

Washington Post: 

[T] he average news consumer in the United States is a headline-reader -- at best. A new study by the Media Insight Project, an initiative of the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute -- the entire thing is enlightening about how we consume (and don't consume) news -- affirms this fact.

Here are the key sentences from the study:

Fewer Americans invest additional time into following the news more in-depth. The survey asked people about going in-depth for news two different ways. It asked whether people generally tried to get news in-depth on any subject in the last week. It also asked, when they recalled a breaking news story they followed in the last week, whether they had tried to find out more about it after initially learning of it.

Overall, 41 percent of Americans report that they watched, read, or heard any in-depth news stories, beyond the headlines, in the last week. Slightly more people, 49 percent, report that they invested additional time to delve deeper and follow up on the last breaking news story they followed.

So, roughly six in 10 people acknowledge that they have done nothing more than read news headlines in the past week. And, in truth, that number is almost certainly higher than that, since plenty of people won't want to admit to just being headline-gazers but, in fact, are. 

Politicians know this - hence the term, "sound bites", but so do newspaper editors and global warmists.