It’s a fair bet that most U.S. citizens didn’t study Latin in school or, if they did, they remember very little of it.
Most can probably recall that carpe diem means seize the day. They can probably remember alma mater and et cetera, too.
Habeas corpus? Many will have a notion of it and, perhaps, a hazy memory that there’s something about that in the U.S. constitution. Many folks, however, would not likely to be able to adequately understand it as the constitutional right to due process, basically to appear in court where the burden of proof is on prosecutors to justify a detention.
While using habeas corpus in a headline appears to be fairly common practice, it is not going to convey its significance when many people don’t understand the phrase and most people don’t get read past the headline and subhead of news stories online.
From The New York Times, May 10:
Trump Officials Consider Suspending Habeas Corpus for Detained Migrants
Stephen Miller, a top aide, repeated a justification used in the immigration crackdown: that the country is fighting an invasion. But it is unclear if the president has the power to take such a step.
The Times missed the opportunity to define the phrase in its lengthy subhead, as well. It was fairly typical of the coverage from other publications, including those in the screenshot of Google News at the top of this post. Of these, only ABC News defined habeas corpus in a subhead, which you don’t see from this Google News screenshot until you click on the story to open it on the ABC website.
The irony of the ABC headline — which also asks “What would this mean?'“ — is that the network’s story doesn’t even hint at the answer to this question until the second paragraph: “If carried out by President Donald Trump, the suspension of habeas corpus would be a dramatic escalation of his administration's immigration policy by significantly curtailing a right enshrined in the Constitution.”
Now, did you get from the headline this same sense of “dramatic escalation” that the story describes?
I’m not saying these are examples of bias, as they are relatively standard practice. That alone, however, doesn’t make it right. Headline writers just need to do a better job helping readers understand the significance of the news.
Using a phrase in a foreign language – even one every American should know – without defining it in the headline or subhead is careless, overestimating the intelligence of the average reader or both and probably something else, too.
I suggest using the general definition, or even a shorter description. Replacing habeas corpus with “Constitutional rights” doesn’t make the headline all that much longer and could work with all of the headlines above. The phrase habeas corpus can always be identified in the subhead or first two paragraphs of the story.
A headline that says a president is considering denying constitutional rights to people is a lot stronger than the ones written for the stories cited here. Doing so also gives the headline the urgency that matches the significance detailed in these stories.