The act of a journalist taking a quote our of context and making a headline out of it is rather boring. And obvious. And lazy. Non?
Tina Fey writes about this in her book Bossypants, using the example of when a friend of hers interviewed her for TV Guide and she made the (unfortunate) joke of saying if McCain and Palin won the 2008 election she would "leave Earth". Fey explained how she was simply exaggerating the typical, "If ___ becomes President, I'm moving to Canada" joke that everyone uses during an election. However, that quote turned a big OMG TINA FEY WILL LEAVE EARTH IF THEY'RE ELECTED deal across all of the cable news networks, and Republicans everywhere freaked out. Including members of her own family.
In a recent interview about her role in Shame, Carey Mulligan made the joke to the Guardian that she hadn't seen herself naked in the mirror "probably a decade" because she's "very prudish" and, what do you know, that's the headline for the piece. It's also the headline for stories in Marie Claire, The Telegraph, Jezebel and plenty of other news sites. Some focus on the "prude" part, others on just the "naked". Well done, everyone. Well done.
Obviously, it was a joke. Obviously when Mulligan said it, she didn't think it would be used as a headline or that everyone would choose to focus on that instead of her work in Shame or The Great Gatsby, but, apparently the words NAKED and PRUDE are so much more interesting than all that. Sure, any celebrity should be aware that a journalist will take a quote made in jest and use it as the headline, but it's still lazy if not completely and totally boring.
Carey Mulligan as Sissy Sullivan in Shame