I guess they need to do whatever they can to get people to read their stuff in today's competitive environment and I suppose I can't really blame them for that but the problem I have with this rather devious way of reporting, if you can even call it that, is that I suspect that most people read ONLY the headlines and then they become more misinformed than they previously were. I think that the digital age was probably initially intended to make people smarter and MORE informed but it seems to have had the opposite effect.
While I am not actually affiliated with or even interested in a lot of the news feeds that I subscribe to, I do subscribe to a lot of them and will admit that this is mostly out of morbid curiosity about what sort of lies they are going to try to spoon feed to the ravenous actual subscribers on a daily basis.
Here is a good example of an outlet intentionally misleading their readers.
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That seems like the link is going to be to a bombshell of an article doesn't it? It would be and will be very big news when Trump announces who he has chosen for his running mate. It will dominate the news cycle for a lot of reasons and seeing as how most of the media is leftist, I am quite certain it will be a mostly negative things trying as hard as possible to make whoever it is that he eventually does choose look as bad as possible.
There is a glaring problem with the actual article though, which is written by Conservative Brief in that at no point in the article or in the world that we live in, has Trump actually announced who his running mate is.
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So once you get to the article you get a little bit closer to the truth but even that headline is intentionally misleading as it suggests that Trump said that this person is his "potential running mate." Trump never said that and as much as conservative media complains about liberal media taking Trump out of context, here they are, doing it themselves.
What really happened was that Trump was being interviewed and the interviewer brought up Robert F. Kennedy Jr and suggested that he could be a running mate and asked Trump what he thought of him.
At no point during the interview did DJT even hint that Kennedy was being remotely considered for the position, even though the interviewer tried to goad Trump into saying that he was being considered.
I think it would be an amazing step towards repairing the obviously seriously damaged and broken USA political system for people from opposite parties to run on the same ticket but that just isn't going to happen. The candidates know it, the news stations know it, the people know it, yet dumb news organizations like Conservative Brief will release headlines like this at least a couple times a week and dupe and confuse their audience.
No wonder the average person doesn't really have any idea what is going on in politics and simply has tiny pieces of the whole story... just enough to keep them hopeful about "their guy" and enough to keep them angry at "not their guy."
I wish the people would realize that the none of the guys are actually "their guy" and work to overhaul the system. If people would wake up and realize the two-party system has been for a while and is always going to be destined for failure, we might actually be able to make some sort of meaningful changes in this country.
I don't think it will ever happen in my lifetime though and articles like this one - trust me, there are many many many more - ensure that the people stay dumb enough to continue believing that everything will be fine as long as our guy wins.
I don't even need to read the article - even regular schmoes that I had been following for years on YouTube, etc., succumbed to that debauchery - and it makes me just wanna vom.
Even back in the early 80's in my journalism courses, were were taught to use the "inverted pyramid" method of authoring articles - the excuse back then was space restrictions - editors needing to make the most out of space, so every article had to be written in such a way that the editor could cut your article off at the end of any paragraph to make space for the real estate needed by other journalists.
So we had the headline, an attention grabber, followed by a leading sentance / paragraph with the "Big idea", then supporting info in decreasing order of either significance or sensationalism.
I guess the SERPS by indexers like Google and others incintivized click-bait as a valid relevance, but in reality, they were just encouraging trash headers so that we (the average joeschmoes of the world) can't even really be certain that the headlines grabbing us actually relate to something relevant or truly interesting to the audience the authors seek to engage.
It's a very sad state - resist the urge to write according the rules of SEO - that amost guarantees that your articles will be trash.
Instead, talk to your audience - the subject matter should speak for itself and once your readership learns that you don't do click-bait they'll become loyal followers and even subscribe to your RSS or ATOM feeds :)
BTW, I really find your publishing interesting - you make people think, ask questions, and engage their cerebrums.
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an absolutely wonderful response. You brought back memories of my own time taking journalism classes and yes, what you say is completely true. There is a lot of wisdom in what you have above there and is a more concise breakdown of what I was touching base on. Thanks for your praise on my publishing. I don't write often but when I do it kind of brings me back to a time when I considered doing this for a living but then the bottom fell out of the industry. .
I'm sure tptb knew the internet would be a fabulous tool for influencing our understanding of "reality." We the people have been very slow to see how it has enslaved our minds, but we are coming to.
me too. I read the NYTimes every single day for this purpose.
I believe this is called "putting words in someone's mouth." Beware of people who do this!
as always you are one of the people out there that has it figured out. I'm glad there are some people out there that think for themselves.
Making news from no news is what they do these days and shows a lack of professionalism and one sidedness.