Revised July 13, 2019: There is a dissonance between headline and column in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times.

If you want a clear, accurate summary of the Trump administration’s treatment of kids jailed at our southern border, Doyle McManus’s column is a good place to look. He runs through the whole “cruel, appalling mess.” McManus reviews the reports that establish what’s happening, rips away the cynical rationale for the program, takes administration officials to task point by point, and knocks down Trump’s attempt to blame Democrats.

But that’s not quite what you’d expect from the (print edition) headline, “No partisan excuse for this,” which references two paragraphs in the story—paragraphs number 22 and 23. They read in full:

Finally, this shouldn’t be a partisan debate, even in an election season — but, of course, it is.

“The Democrats’ bad immigration laws, which could be easily fixed, are the problem,” Trump tweeted. On the other side, Democratic presidential candidates have been outdoing each other in supporting leniency for migrants who enter the country illegally.

While the column is an indictment of Trump and administration officials, the headline and two paragraphs out of twenty-five, purport to make it about partisanship. The mainstream media aims for Democrats vs. Republicans, both-sides-are-at-it-again journalism to showcase ‘balance,’ but in this case the motif is hardly more than a fig leaf: no one who reads it will be fooled into thinking this is a story about partisanship in Washington.

Yes, “on the other side” numerous Democratic candidates have been “supporting leniency” in their primary campaigns. But the L.A. Times might as well have sent a reporter to the National Mall to quiz the first twenty tourists on their opinions—because those visitors are as accountable for what’s happening at the border as Democrats on the campaign trail. This is Trump’s doing.

So what’s going on? The headline, which fits comfortably within the journalistic canons of objectivity and balance, seeks to draw in readers from both sides (and may well do so more effectively than a headline that more accurately conveyed the commentary’s substance), while—unlike standard click-bait on the web—even though readers don’t get quite what they expected, the column has the virtue of delivering a solid story.