It's all in the headline

Let's say there was a story about how the very same AIG executives who ruined their company and cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars were still going to receive millions in bonuses.

If you were writing the headline, what would you write?

If you were the NYT, you'd go with: A.I.G. Planning Huge Bonuses After $170 Billion Bailout

Reserved, yet snarky.

Here's WaPo: Bailout King AIG Still to Pay Millions In Bonuses

Little more snark - without sacrificing accuracy.

CBS News: After Rescue, Bonuses Still Flow At AIG

Casual, but they don't spare the rod.

And then there's the AP:  Insurance giant AIG agrees to restructure bonuses

WTH?

Way to completely miss the boat there. I know the AP is supposed to be dispassionate, but c'mon the meat of this story is not "AIG is going to look at how it will structure bonuses in the future" but "AIG is still shelling out cash to the total losers who drove their company (and the economy) off a cliff."

Oh, well at least they're not the Atlantic's Conor Clarke: Are AIG's bonuses really so bad?

Here's his attempt at logic:

Once you get above a certain dollar figure -- $10 million dollars is my psychological threshold -- it ceases to be an amount of money that you can think about in tangible terms (fitting into  a sleek black briefcase, say) and becomes an abstraction. But you can't make good policy with abstractions. The most you can make is awkward conversation.

I'm sure he's right. Big numbers are too hard to think about. Smaller, easier numbers are readily available in the sports pages.

Leave the big numbers to the smart people. They've never steered us wrong.