Typical pattern: “Scientists find something strange when they look at a common whatever - and it’s not good!”
This kind of crap used to be the style of little blurbs at the side or the bottom of an article, but it’s in the headlines now. Until you click the headline you don’t even really know what the article is about anymore - just the general topic area, with maybe a fear trigger.
Clicking on the headline is going to display ads, but at that point the goal isn’t to get you to buy anything yet, it’s just to generate ad impressions, which the content provider gets paid for regardless of whether you even see the ads. It’s a weird meta-revenue created by the delivery mechanism, and it has altered the substance of headlines, and our expectations of what “headline” even means.
Sometimes the articles themselves are fine, and it’s just the editorial department that adds the sensational headlines. I don’t know if it’s worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
If the marketing has the power to go over the journalism to change the titles, isn’t it a symptom that things are going downward for this media?
Haven’t the titles always been traditionally written by someone other that the articles author?
As long as journalism quality is respected that’s not an issue.