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8 Out Of 10 Will Only Read This Headline
Headlines lie to catch attention. Only few read beyond them.
They will miss the facts, and the falsehood of the headlines. It is a dangerous development.
Here is an Australian example of current headline writing:
Top secret information about Australia’s military hacked
The lede:
TOP secret technical information about new fighter jets, navy vessels, and surveillance aircraft has been stolen from an Australian defence contractor.
The story could be relevant – if true. But it does not hold what the headline promises. The text says:
- ".. the firm was subcontracted four levels down from defence contracts."
- ".. a mum and dad type business … with about 50 employees"
- "the admin password, to enter the company’s web portal, was ‘admin’ and the guest password was ‘guest’"
- "the information … included a diagram in which you could zoom in down to the captain’s chair and see that it was one metre away from the navigation chair"
- "the information disclosed was commercially sensitive, it was unclassified"
The last snippet completely rebuts the headline. It appears in 18th of the 20 paragraph story.
A truthful (but boring) headline might have said: "Mechanics rat-shop puts marketing stuff on open website". No one would have clicked on it.
Headlines disproved by the following text have become common:
"It was not immediately clear what Trump was responding to."
"A large number of ads appeared in [other] areas of the country that were not heavily contested in the elections."
"It is too soon to map out exactly how the drug war will affect the health of Filipinos."
News content is now of lesser relevance than ever. "Clicks" are generated by headlines:
"Clicks" generate "visits" which convert into advertising revenue. Such headlines make economic sense – short-term. But the best paying advertisers seek a quality audience. In the long-term they will avoid such sites.
Once upon a time sensationalist false headlines were the loony realm of tabloid media. That is unfortunately no longer the case. Headlines of even reputable media no longer transmit facts. One has to dive deep into the stories to get to real information.
This trend will lead to a further stultification of the population. It makes it easier to manipulate the plebs.
I couldn’t resist the earlier facetious post, but B. is quite right.
Headlines are typically sensational, distorted, and intentionally misleading. This is an old journalistic custom, a legacy of the print-media tradition.
It’s justified, or excused, as a kind of benevolent mendacity necessary to grab eyeballs.
I don’t know if this is purely a US phenomenon, but it’s a variation of the childish “trick” of pointing to nothing in particular; when one’s companions peer in the direction the trickster is pointing, the trickster gleefully says, “Made you look! Made you look!”
However, Internet headlines escalate this supposedly benign deception by several orders of magnitude. In cyberspace, “grabbing eyeballs” is an antecedent with a consequent: clicking on the headline. Thus, the term “clickbait”.
I’m not particularly knowledgeable about the commercial aspects of running a website, but I know that “clicks” are a kind of currency. Like “counting coup”, tallying clicks are one measure of a site’s popularity, which in turn enhances its commercial potential.
So it’s in the site’s interest to deliberately publish wildly inaccurate headlines and ledes, the better to maximize visitors’ clicks.
This doesn’t contradict B.’s assertion that “This trend will lead to a further stultification of the population. It makes it easier to manipulate the plebs.”
Even if a viewer takes the (click)bait, that’s no guarantee that the viewer will drill down to the inevitable contradictions or disclaimers buried in the text.
And, apart from their “clickbait” coefficient, Internet headlines are also increasingly hysterical; they’re nodes in an escalating spiral of general hysteria.
For instance, since I have an old backup Yahoo e-mail account, I got into the dubious habit of checking the aptly-named Yahoo site every day. I’ve noticed a sharp escalation in melodramatic headlines and blurbs this year.
Most of them are Trump-related, and most of those amount to “alarms”, or warnings, of some dire or extreme consequence of Trump’s latest tweets, or actions. They scream breathlessly that everything from nuclear war to Trump’s impeachment is imminent, based on some trivial or passing development that never justifies the inflated headline.
Other than “crying wolf ‘Trump!'”, they favor stories showcasing some individual being wronged by an alleged insult or injury.
These are the cyberspace descendents of “human interest” stories, except here the “human interest” focuses on some victim’s highly-emotional reaction to some trendy outrage or scandal. This can vary from, say, endless stories about customers writing vicious comments about a server on a restaurant check, to the latest airline employee(s) abusing passengers.
And celebrities are also a staple source of screaming headlines. Apparently Yahoo editors are obsessed with celebrity scandals, and other celebrities’ reactions to the scandal, ad infinitum.
This is indeed the old “trash-tabloid” approach, writ virtual.
Once in a while the story is actually newsworthy and worthwhile. But it’s just as B. points out: sensational, virtually truth-free headlines and coy, disingenuous pseudo-journalism are elements of a constant mass-media “blooming, buzzing confusion” designed to keep complacent and submissive “consumers” in a state of pernicious, permanent confusion, uncertainty, and anxiety.
Posted by: Ort | Oct 12 2017 18:48 utc | 6
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