Kulturkampf

[Potato]

That last tweet is TECHNICALLY wrong, typically headlines are applied to stories after they've been written, edited and approved often without the editors let alone the writers getting notified or any say. I think this is an obviously stupid practice but it stems from journalistic history where the paper was literally laid out physically with prewritten pieces and the headlines decided at that point for best attention drawing. At most papers in the modern age, these decisions are all the same people, a separate headline staff is blatantly redundant and continues in this role for legacy reasons. I would suspect they likely just glanced at the title while approving the final layout on a computer, it looked "long enough" so they didn't notice the wrong word.

One reason the people on Twitter/Era/etc. who get their news almost entirely from headlines and never read the actual articles to the end are often so woefully uninformed. The purpose of headlines is to get you interested, not to inform you of anything.

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

The NYT probably pays these unionized workers $200K a year and couldn't easily replace them.

Articles are usually submitted with a suggested headline but it's up to editors to decide what goes on there. 

What's most concerning about this mistake is that, as far as I can tell, the writer used the acronym NATO without ever spelling it out in the text in the first instance. While I haven't looked at the NYT style guide, it's likely that any acronym should be written in full in the first instance with the acronym in parentheses and then used thereafter.

The style guide is the Bible for any publication. If their writers aren't following it and their editors don't know it by heart then they've got bigger problems.