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.
NPR and the BBC still aren’t doing that.
Thankfully there are still a lot of amazing news sources that have held onto their integrity. Click here to see even more. Number 17 will surprise you!
That’s a very good list. I just threw out the first couple that came to mind, but it is worth calling out the organizations that are still trying to do real journalism.
I give small sustaining donations to NPR, ProPublica, and The Guardian. I hope to add a few more when I can.