I’d say journalism is always like this when it is profit motivated. There are a couple of factors at play. First, you need to publish your article as fast as possible so no one beats you to the scoop and take views away from your piece. Next, you are incentivized to oversimplify everything to ensure your article appeals to as broad an audience as possible. Finally, you are incentivized to write sensationalist titles to attract attention.
The outcome of this gets gnarly fast. People’s first impressions usually color how they forever view the story. For a long time people still believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, even after it was clear that was false. Part of this is psychological, but part of it is that reading the corrections section of the news is boring as hell. I think some of THAT is just human nature of we’re fascinated by the novel, and correcting details isn’t novel. But also some is that publishers don’t want you paying close attention to their fuckups so they bury them. They think it would reduce your trust in them
Next, oversimplifying tends to result in inaccuracies. Its a game of telephone. An expert explains their very best understanding of what’s going on to the journalist, simplifying it because the journalist isn’t an expert and needs to ask questions to grasp the parts that don’t immediately make sense. Depending on the field, even the expert might not have fully solidified their understanding yet. Anyway. The journalist simplifies their understanding of the subject for mass consumption. Generally speaking, the audience can’t ask the journalist follow up questions like how the journalist did with the expert, so we’ve just crossed a territory into which resolving misconceptions is going to be much harder going forward. After that, let’s be real, you’re probably going to summarize stories you heard to your friends creating further layers of simplification.
Finally, let’s be honest with ourselves, we’ve all read an article title, not read the article, and still retained whatever misleading sensationalist title the author wrote.
I’d say journalism is always like this when it is profit motivated. There are a couple of factors at play. First, you need to publish your article as fast as possible so no one beats you to the scoop and take views away from your piece. Next, you are incentivized to oversimplify everything to ensure your article appeals to as broad an audience as possible. Finally, you are incentivized to write sensationalist titles to attract attention.
The outcome of this gets gnarly fast. People’s first impressions usually color how they forever view the story. For a long time people still believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, even after it was clear that was false. Part of this is psychological, but part of it is that reading the corrections section of the news is boring as hell. I think some of THAT is just human nature of we’re fascinated by the novel, and correcting details isn’t novel. But also some is that publishers don’t want you paying close attention to their fuckups so they bury them. They think it would reduce your trust in them
Next, oversimplifying tends to result in inaccuracies. Its a game of telephone. An expert explains their very best understanding of what’s going on to the journalist, simplifying it because the journalist isn’t an expert and needs to ask questions to grasp the parts that don’t immediately make sense. Depending on the field, even the expert might not have fully solidified their understanding yet. Anyway. The journalist simplifies their understanding of the subject for mass consumption. Generally speaking, the audience can’t ask the journalist follow up questions like how the journalist did with the expert, so we’ve just crossed a territory into which resolving misconceptions is going to be much harder going forward. After that, let’s be real, you’re probably going to summarize stories you heard to your friends creating further layers of simplification.
Finally, let’s be honest with ourselves, we’ve all read an article title, not read the article, and still retained whatever misleading sensationalist title the author wrote.