It's something I've seen more than once in my career - the "can't get past the lead," or in some cases, "can't get past the headline," phenomenon.
One example involves an April Fool's Day spoof that is best left out of the discussion. More recently was Brian Zinchuk's Top of the Pile column in the April 17 Regional Optimist.
In the online version of the column, his original title of "The gun kooks were right" stayed intact. The headline was changed in the newspaper version to "Take away guns, people turn to knives," not for purposes of sensibility, but because Zinchuk's choice simply didn't fit.
Gauging reaction to the printed column is somewhat difficult, but it's safe to say the online version "went viral." As of this Wednesday morning the column had received 4,798 hits.
And those hits brought comments, remarks that in the early hours were exuberant and eloquent attacks on the author for his description of anti-gun control activists as "kooks." It was yet another case of not getting beyond the lead paragraph, or the headline.
Zinchuk's tongue-in-cheek assessment of the futility of trying to curb violence by imposing controls on the weapons used in attacks fired right over the heads of most respondents in the early going of their tirade against his view point.
As the barrage played out, however, a tidal shift could be discerned, especially after Zinchuk pointed out that he himself is a "gun kook," having had military aspirations quashed by a medical condition and growing up in a family that thrived on moose and deer meat.
Then, it seemed, those hung up on the "kook" designation actually bothered to read what he had written. Amused and bemused, Zinchuk kept a tally of response to his column - 290 likes, 150 shares, more than 150 comments across two Facebook pages, www.newsoptimist.ca, a forum called Gunnutz and 15 emails to his inbox.
In his words, "… people saw 'kook' and didn't realize the satire in the piece and got flaming mad.
"Then all of a sudden there was a realization that, 'oh, he's one of us,' and then more than 70 per cent of comments were supportive, but 30 per cent were still negative, from gun owners no less, which made no sense."
Zinchuk added that the rapid and vicious response to his column was what prompted him to use the term "kook" in the first place. "It obviously fits some people."
Reading comprehension is always a challenge for the journalist, and in this case columnist. Tongue in cheek is perhaps the most dangerous of all formats, as people are more likely to think in terms of black and white than to enjoy the subtleness of the grey areas of satire and humour.
Those who backpeddled and ate a little crow after determining the real message of Zinchuk's column can be forgiven. They are products of the instant communication age in which it is more and more apparent people are ready and willing to blurt out the first thing that comes to their fingertips, without giving careful thought to what they have to say.
Lively discourse is a positive thing, however. It can teach us some valuable lessons - read beyond the headline, and the lead paragraph, and think before you speak.
