If it weren’t so sad, I would have laughed harder at the headline. The boy is in a t-shirt and the diaper survived the night in the woods. At least that is what I think the comma is telling me.
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Hmmm … yeah … I see where you’re coming from, but … well … y’know that it would read ‘survive …’ and not ‘survives’ had they meant that a boy and a diaper survived together in the woods.
It’s a strange headline, you’re right to poke fun at it, but you’ve gone and tagged it as ‘poor writing’ and … well … it’s not, it’s correct, you simply misread it.
What I wrote is not wrong and I misread nothing. The headline reads “1-year-old boy in T-shirt, diaper survives night in woods” Almost as if the there are two things going on. The boy is in a t-shirt. The diaper is in the woods over night. Changing the word “survives” to “survive” alone would not fix it. Dropping the comma and adding “and” instead would have.