By Michael Cole

 

I will lay odds that the title got you here.

Honestly, it wrote it with that very thing in mind. You have to click on the article, read it, share it on Social Media. That, in turn, means that one day, when I have enough followers, I can be driven around in a gold-plated limo while others toil and tremble in my presence.

At least that’s the plan.

Slanted Journalism, Fake News, Yellow Journalism, Biased Reporting.

Click Bait.

Now, I am not going to rant and rave about the pretended biases that we hurl on to the mainstream media. Yeah, there are times where they do show bias; but, for the most part, journalists are willing to do the hard work to report the facts.

The real breakdown of the media is the commercialism side.

So, in an ironic twist of fate, freedom of speech is falling victim to free enterprise.

Truth has become the casualty in this competition.

Think about it. Station X must beat Station Y in the ratings because with good ratings comes advertising dollars. This direction leads Station X to run a story before all the facts are in, to be the Breaking News Channel.

They need you glued to your chairs, watching intently.

With the advent of internet “news,” the demands of being dominated or even profitable are harder than ever before.

Enter the psychological part of journalism.

Say goodbye to facts, and hello to click-bait

Now, I am not accusing the media of out and out lying to the public; I am instead pointing out that, the press was forced to become more glamorous, harder hitting to grab the attention of the reader in an attempt to stay relevant.

We have all seen those articles, the ones that as a title put movie trailers to shame. To captivate you into clicking on the article.

To you it is annoying, but to the person operating the website, it is how they make money. Advertisers pay them for clicks. We often forget one thing, journalism is a for-profit endeavor. The media does not place or run an article if they stand a chance of losing subscribership or advertising dollars.

When I was campaigning a few years ago, the publisher of a local paper had a story that could have changed the outcome of the election. But she would not run it since the Republican Party bought a lot of advertising dollars in her paper. Plus, as a bonus, she knew most of her advertisers were Republicans and would stop buying ad space.

(Editor’s Note: The paper mentioned is not The Orange Leader, but a newspaper in another County.)

She had to choose between the truth and keeping a paper that employed a dozen people open.

So, media in the United States, print or internet, is there to make a profit. Anyone who claims otherwise is misinformed or lying.

It makes sense then, to avoid printing news they feel would damage their sales. But still, that is not enough to be competitive in the age of 24/7 news cycles and the fact that anyone with a website can start writing and call themselves news.

True click-bait.

We all have done it. Seen the glamourous headline and then clicked through 20 or 50 pages to see who was the biggest this, or things you aren’t supposed to know about, yet they do.

There you see all sorts of carefully placed ads.

That forces the real media to compete with that. Your time is what they need. Your click, your interest.

We go from

Fire Department Rescues Cat Stuck in Tree

To this

You Will Never Guess What the Fire Department Did with this CAT!

 

Be honest; given a choice, you would click on the second one.

And that is how the media has been forced to change, and not necessarily for the better, to keep their doors open.

                  Michael Thought his Article was Finished, WAIT till you see what he wrote NEXT…