‘The Age’ Got Ripped A New One Over A Bafflingly Racist-Sounding Headline

I don’t want to pull the curtain back too far, but writing headlines is hard. You have to make them concise, informative, easy to parse if someone is scanning, and, most importantly, entertaining. 
Not all outlets are like us, where we can just drop the word “chode” into a headline if it looks too boring. Newspapers and the like are bound by standards of decorum and decency, and the people who work there (“journalists“, I believe they’re called) are forced to use things like wordplay and metaphor instead of just calling something “Fucked As“.
Frankly, I applaud them. I personally would be fucked if I couldn’t occasionally put “Suck The Dick Off A Frothy One” in a headline, so naturally I’m slow to criticise decisions they make. I would, however, very tentatively suggest avoiding the usage of racially-charged, xenophobic historical metaphors to describe the inconvenience of bicycles being on the footpath. 
For example, this particularly baffling headline from ‘The Age‘:
If you’re unfamiliar, the phrase has historically been used to describe the ‘threat’ of the world (particularly the western world) being overrun by people from East Asia. Unsurprisingly, it has hugely racist connotations. An article about how oBike (a Singaporean dockless bike-sharing app that has started operating in Melbourne) has left bicycles on footpaths, seems like a wildly inappropriate place to evoke that.
People on Twitter were taken a bit aback:

A few people rushed to suggest that perhaps they were just referring to the nickname for the public sculpture ‘Vault‘ by artist Ron Robertson-Swann, but there is a very noticeable lack of say, quotation marks to indicate that it is referring to an informal name for the piece, or capitalisation to indicate that the words “yellow peril” were here used as the name of an artistic work.
Even if that was the intention, to people not from Melbourne, this stylistic decision and the complete absence of any reference to the sculpture in the article just makes it look as if they are referring to the racist phrase. 
On top of that, there’s not really any particularly clear through-line as to how they are equivalent, other than the fact that they are both in Melbourne, and yellow. All in all: not an amazing choice.
After copping a fair bit of flak, ‘The Age‘ has since deleted the original tweets and replaced the headline with something less grabby but also substantially less racist-sounding.
If you’re interested, the answer to that question is “Maybe.”
Photo: Supplied.

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