Maybe it’s selective or confirmation bias, but a vast number of “news” sites seem to have taken a swan dive into the clickbait oceans lately. Even fairly upright, sober news sites seem to tail into scads of “You Won’t Believe” and “The Secret Reaons” and “[CELEBRITY NAME HERE]'s [OVERWROUGHT ADJECTIVE HERE] [PERSONAL/PRIVATE EVENT HERE]” crap.
TV news, especially local, has been doing this for decades. If nothing else, the Internet has caught up.
No way. The Dope only links to classy stuff like cheerleader wardrobe fails.
Of all of the items under the heading “I don’t watch TV,” the level at which I watch national news coverage approaches zero and is orders of magnitude above the level at which I even glimpse local TV news.
It’s always been horrid stuff, and the twenty seconds or so I see from time to time only makes me wonder who on earth watches it.
And understand, I *get *the audience for most crap.
Cheerleader wardrobe fails? With no link? C’mon. That’s not right.
Yes we all remember you don’t watch television… except for when you do. Or was it “television” (which is different somehow, right?)
Why is there always someone in a TV thread that sez this? Who cares?
In any comic book TV show thread half the posts will start, “I don’t read comics but…” Who cares?
Amateur Barbarian doesn’t watch TV, and you won’t believe what happens next…
I didn’t say it just to wave the flag and move on. It was to give my comments about TV news some context.
I think TV viewers are more akin to the frog in boiling water than most such comparisons. If you’ve watched continuously, the endlessly rising tide of crapulence is harder to notice and put in context. If you are forced to watch a few minutes every year or two, the change is somewhere between obvious and shocking. Nowhere have I found this more applicable than in TV news in general, and local TV news in particular.
I don’t understand how it still has any audience, even among TV viewers.
The context being that you have no experience about what you speak?
“I never eat fast food, but Jack in the Box has the worst!”.
“I have never been to France, but it’s a horrible place to visit!”
If you care to take up the banner in defense of local TV news, far be it from me to stand in your way.
I am not utterly insulated from TV - it’s nearly impossible to be so even if you choose to. I will not deliberately turn on television news for anything - the last time was many years ago when it was still the only way to get something like realtime updates on an evolving news situation of some personal impact. It’s also within my professional radar in many ways, so I know more about it than a non-viewer would (and most viewers, for that matter.)
But five or six times a year, I end up somewhere where I’m more or less forced to watch a few minutes of local TV news, and every single time, without fail, I can note ways it’s gotten stupider, yet more ratings driven, heavier on the biff-bam-boom graphic and whizzardy, and utterly dependent on the commercial hooks. What’s missing is what’s always been missing, only more so: the scant teaspoons of content from yesteryear are now vapors floating past all the eyeball-candy and naked manipulation of the audience.
So, yeah, it only takes one bite of a fast-food hamburger to spit it out and proclaim it horrid. Or so Shaw said.
My point - assuming you give any small shit and aren’t already composing your next snarky dismissal - is that it’s easier to see that devolution from intermittent samples than continuous viewing. A long roll down a shit-covered hill tells you less than falling in successively deeper catholes.
I noticed something subtle about the rising tide of clickbait - nothing earth-shattering, but interesting to me.
Anyone who’s run any kind of blog or news site knows that post summary panels use a fairly simple algorithm to determine where to truncate headlines - often just “this many words or characters fit, jam in ellipsis, move on.”
I guess I carried that assumption into the wide world of clickbaiting until I dimly noticed that on most sites, the teaser headlines vary greatly in length. And always, *always *break on the most enticing word. I mean, duh in retrospect, but I wanted to highlight that for anyone who hadn’t noticed. Another facet of how the game is played on us.
But it was happening to you at the time.
Sorry to tell ya Sparky, but that’s as good as it gonna get for you.
A certain progressive talk radio host I listen to refers to CNN as “Chicken Noodle News” for this reason, among others.
I like to read Salon.com, but they have a had a few of these pretty obviously trolly articles where they have the author make a point, that might be reasonable, but centered around something that is so patently indefensible that it seems just an attempt to get people sending it around.
There was this one a few months ago about how white people should never belly dance. There might be an honest point there about cultural appropriation, but the point that only people of certain races are given license to do certain dances is a world that I don’t want to live in.
Then, today there is this gem about white privilege, which again, is a very legitimate discussion. But, the author centers it around a story where she is taking up two seats on a crowded train while wearing headphones to ignore everyone else. Anyone who has taken mass transit knows this move where you try to get an extra seat by using your bags to sit on the empty seat, wear headphones, stare out the window and act like you don’t notice that you’re being an asshole and hoping no one will challenge you.
The story continues that a man tries to ask her to move her things, and when she can’t or doesn’t want to hear him, he, apparently rudely moves her stuff for her. Which is somehow evidence of white privilege (he is white and she is black).
Both of these articles seem to try to make such an obviously dishonest point centered around a genuine issue that I can’t help but think that they are just to try to get people worked up in the comments section in an attempt to go viral.
"I don’t know about anybody else but I find that “Cheerleader wardrobe fail” chick extremely compelling.
There’s a difference between ads being clickbait, which is obnoxious but understandable, and the articles in a putative news website being clickbait.
“Terrorists attacked a school in Pakistan, what happened next will shock you”
“5 things you need to know right now about the Sydney hostage crisis”
“Local mom outraged by Federal Reserve chairman’s unexplained policy announcement”
“11 most shocking Capitol Hill nip slips”
“While reading the leaked Sony emails, I saw something that brought me to tears”