Clickbait Rots Your Teeth
The Washington Post recently reported a story headlined Whom to trust when it comes to health-care reform? Trump supporters put their faith in him. It laid out a fairly bleak picture, with a few especially dispiriting anecdotes of self-decieved DT supporters. Raw Story (a liberal-leaning outlet, quite honest despite strong bias) quickly re-reported the story with a lot of paraphrasing, a link to the original, and a new headline:
Trump supporter credits Trumpcare — which hasn’t taken effect — for dramatically lower health costs
This is all fairly standard, of course, but bear with me.
Folks, one foolish DT supporter is not worth our focus. That’s why the Post used the same interview as support, rather than putting it in the headline. Raw Story milks the attention of the Resistance (with a sideline in outraged conservatives) for clicks. And they do it based on someone else's original reporting and, in this case, one anecdote (Raw Story: real news that isn't really news).
Clickbait is designed to distract and provoke; and it works. Heck, it worked on me. However satisfying, it generally serves no one but the site’s owners. And about that….
The meat of the story is all in the original, and that's what deserves our attention. The advertising dollars they get from us will go further at the Post than at Raw Story. Raw Story's superiority is in maximizing our outrage endorphins and shortening our reading time by cutting content.
There will always be another confident moron on the other team with another crazy quote. We won't get far if we're genuinely rocked by such "revelations".