DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

In 1980 the governors of California and Nevada, Jerry Brown and Robert List, met at Incline Village to discuss the future of Lake Tahoe.

During that conference, a journalists' organization held a meeting in the same hotel, and List's press secretary Bill Phillips was the speaker. One of Phillips' observations during that speech was that he seldom had objections to the stories written about the governor, but he often objected to their headlines. Those headlines often went beyond the information in the stories under them or just plain misrepresented the stories.

After that meeting we went to a joint news conference of Brown and List at which Gov. List said he would call a special session of the Nevada Legislature to amend the bi state Tahoe Regional Planning Compact but only if several conditions were met.

The next day the headline in a Reno newspaper was, "List to call special session."

Reporters don't often write the headlines over their stories but are usually held responsible for them by the newsmakers who are misrepresented in this fashion. Sometimes it works in favor of the newsmakers, who seldom make complaints then.

On June 20 U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley's office issued a press release about an amendment she filed to an energy and water measure to eliminate funding for the U.S. Department of Energy's children's website. That site features a cartoon of a character named "Yucca Mountain Johnny" that is used to market the proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain. Berkley's news release featured a lot of extravagant and colorful language ("Berkley to Yucca Mountain Johnny: You're fired!") and it didn't make it easy to understand exactly what had happened in Congress, but the correct information was there if reporters read it carefully enough.

In the days after the release was issued, we saw headlines like these:

"House Kills 'Yucca Mountain Johnny'" (Washington Post and USA Today)

"Yucca Mountain Johnny is saying goodbye" MetaFilter.com)

"House Kills 'Yucca Mountain Johnny'" (Newsvine.com)

"The Death of Johnny ... a moment of silence" (tote.wordpress.com)

"House Kills 'Yucca Mountain Johnny'" (KVBC, KLAS, and Fox News web sites)

"Bye, bye Johnny" (Las Vegas Sun editorial)

If you see a certain similarity among some of these sites, it's because they don't actually cover government. Rather, they posted the Associated Press story by Erica Werner that had the headline "House Kills 'Yucca Mountain Johnny'," so that headline appeared in dozens of publications and sites.

As it happened, the House had done no such thing. It had adopted Berkley's amendment to the bill. Or rather, it had adopted the amendment on a voice vote, which probably means that the House chamber was mostly empty at the time of the "vote."

But that didn't kill "Johnny." It merely attached one amendment to a bill that has never actually passed the House.

Granted, Berkley's news release could have been more candid (it didn't even give the bill number - HR 2641). It never mentioned that on June 13 the White House had issued a statement on the bill: "H.R. 2641 exceeds the President's requests for programs funded in this bill by $1.1 billion, part of the $22 billion increase above the President's request for FY 2008 appropriations. ... [I]f H.R. 2641 were presented to the President, he would veto the bill."

But it's not the job of politicians to do reporters' jobs for them. And there were some who got the story right.

National Public Radio reported, "Congress is weighing the fate of Yucca Mountain Johnny."

Here in the Valley Times, the headline was merely "House takes swipe at 'Yucca Johnny'."

The Las Vegas Review Journal said only, "House pans Yucca Internet strategy."

One last note: When there was a real vote of the House on Berkley's amendment last year, by roll call, it was defeated 271-147.