I don’t know who started this, but I always feel frustrated when I see headline along the lines of “USA says” or “China signal”, countries are not people.
I don’t understand why don’t even the best news outlets put headlines like " Official x said this on official order on USA" Or something like that.
I really don’t understand who came up with this way of reporting where they report on officials as their country and I always thought that this is dumb.
It’s pretty much that. Articles have a headline, then a subheadline (the deck or dek), which is usually used to expound upon the headline.
Back in the days of print the headline, subhed, and body all had to fit and look nice so there were limits to how many characters you could use with a headline and subhed and make everything fit and stand out at different sizes, so headlines wound up being written in a distinct style.
And now Google and Apple News and all the other have imposed limits on characters so it all remains. Everyone knows China can’t literally talk but everyone knows what “China, US to discuss” means, and if they don’t they can RTFA