I don’t know what they’re teaching in (LOL) “journalism school” these days. In addition to headlines that have little or nothing to do with the story, we also get plenty of stories that are so poorly written that they make no sense.
You don’t even have to go to two different nooze sources to get two contradictory takes on the same story. Sometimes you can find it in just one story. But again that assumes the headline that got you there is actually connected to the story. Any story.
We need accurate and reliable news. We need it very badly! But we’re not getting it.
“News” has become entertainment, not factual information. The reputation of a media company is no longer built on accuracy and fairness, but instead, upon promotion, hype, and misleading headlines.
And here I was, thinking they just didn’t know how to write headlines that actually related to the story.
If you go to YouTube and look search for videos about the war in the Middle East, you will see some videos with title which leave the implication that the anticipated ground invasion has started and that there have already been decisive results. This is colloquially referred to as “click bait”, and it is the bane of YouTube. It’s another example of misleading potential readers, with headlines that aren’t necessarily an accurate description of the content.
On YouTube, creators are paid by the numbers of minutes of content viewed. If a content creator produces a video which lure a million viewers to spend 10 minutes each viewing, befor they give up, realizing that they had been had, there is some serious money to be made. Many of these videos use text-to-speech, which means that production would vastly simplified, and editing together some stock footage, some news photos, and perhaps some animation, and a video can fool many viewers into wasting 10 minutes or so, before you realize that the video is simply stretching the same news you can find in abundance into a falsely elongated explanation, designed to rope in viewers.
Whether newspapers, stories on a news website, or YouTube videos, the content is structured to get the user to the point which pays the content provider. Back in the day, when I used to buy the Rocky Mountain News from a vending machine on my way to work, the payoff was when I dropped a coin into the slot. In the case of the vaunted Rocky, it was usually a good investment, because it was a newspaper which had earned my trust, but not all papers are truly reputable, and once they have your coinage, it doesn’t matter whether you read the stories or not.
News websites, where each story is surrounded by ads, make their money from ad impressions and especially if you click the link in an ad and visit one of the advertiser’s site.
As mentioned before, YouTube pays per viewer-minutes, and the payoff is a direct function of how many minutes a user can be lured into expending, before they lose interest and click out of the video.
The best way to fight poor journalism, is to refuse to participate. Visiting a website you dislike or watching all the way through a YouTube video you find disappointing pays the content creator just as much as spending time on websites and videos you find useful. Just click away.
I have taken up the custom of commenting on videos, to the effect that as soon as a commercial interrupts it, I’m gone, I will not read the rest.
Then there are the search engines. I requested an imagine of an “ace reporter,” and the first search results I got included an images of rubik’s cube and a locomotive.
Don’t they speak ordinary English?
This is a real problem for those of us who like podcasts. What is advertised as the topic so as to tantalize the clicker often is never even mentioned in the show. One ends up with “There goes another wasted 15 minutes.” Then, if the podcast is full of the “F” word, it only lasts a minute or so with me.