This is a great little case study on how the media works. The claim: HALF OF THE WOMEN IN JAPAN WERE SAMURAI! GROUNDBREAKING! To ensure that you’re thinking that they were warriors in the battlefield, The Independent shows you a nice photo of samurai armor, on top of what you already know about the samurai from modern pop culture. At this stage, you’re primed to wipe your tears thinking about girl power in unexpected places (or get angry about). And, of course, many people only look at the headline, to begin with. What the article actually says: “The mercenary group developed into a rural gentry and by 1615 they had moved away from the battlefield to serve as government officials, scholars, and patrons of the arts. It is here where half of the samurai class were women and although they did not tend to fight they were a vital part of the elite order, playing a key role both on and off the battlefield.” In other words, by the time of the Tokugawa shogunate, between the early 1600s and the late 19th-century imperial restoration, the warrior class served various *administrative roles* employed by the government. So, a bunch of women, likely in privileged social positions, worked for the government. That’s cool, I guess, considering the rigidity of the Japanese social structure in terms of the hierarchy and the gender/sex-based roles. But that’s not what they wanted us to think. Furthermore, this is clearly more than simply clickbait. It’s *deliberately* misleading. And if a seemingly benign article on Japanese history is misleading, imagine how misleading hot political topics may be.