A reader who dislikes a headline often blames the reporter, who in most newsrooms did not write it. Headline writing is a distinct job with constraints the article itself does not have.
The headline serves a different purpose than the article
An article explains an event to someone who has decided to read it. A headline must persuade someone scrolling past that the article is worth opening.
Those are different tasks requiring different skills, which is why newsrooms separated them long before the internet existed.
The separation also provides a second reader, who checks whether the story actually supports the claim being made above it.
Space was the original constraint
In print, a headline had to fit a column width in a specific type size, which meant a fixed number of characters.
That constraint produced the compressed grammar of headline writing, including dropped articles, present tense for past events, and short words chosen for length rather than precision.
Many of those conventions survive online even though the physical limit has gone, because readers learned to parse them.
Digital headlines carry search and social weight
Online, the headline is also the link text, the search result title and the social media preview, and it is often the only part of the story most people ever see.
Editors therefore front-load the words a reader might search for, which is why a headline sometimes states the subject plainly where a print version might have been oblique.
Some publications write two versions, one for the page and one for search and social distribution, which is why the same story can appear under different titles.
Testing changed the practice again
Many publishers now serve alternative headlines to different readers and keep whichever performs better.
This makes headline writing partly empirical, and it explains why a headline can change during the day without the article being edited.
It also creates the pressure that produces overstatement, since the version that attracts more clicks is not always the version that describes the story most accurately.
Reporters carry the consequences either way
The byline sits under the headline, so a reporter is held responsible for wording they did not choose and sometimes did not see before publication.
Corrections policies at serious publications increasingly cover headlines for this reason, treating an inaccurate headline as a factual error rather than a presentational one.
Where a headline and an article appear to disagree, the article is the document that was reported.