News organizations write articles and headlines to deliberately mislead people if it means those people will click on those headlines, open up an article, and engage with some ads. Is this so controversial that nearly half of people disagree?
This doesn’t come from a partisanship bias, as nearly all well known media outlets, large and small, engage in that behavior. Their content often still has some value, and we need both hard and soft reporting to make sense of this world. That doesn’t mean all this content is motivated or framed by some selfless desire to shine the brightest light on the darkest places at any cost.
I don’t think automatically equating skepticism with conspiracy theory adoption is fair. I can’t really think of any conspiracy theory I buy into.
I don’t disagree, but the impressive syntactical gymnastics you did to obfuscate the motivation (“get clicks”) and the guilty act (“intentionally mislead”) is telling.
Untangling that sentence gets us the much clearer, and I think more accurate, “new organizations chase clicks without any interest in whether their headlines are true or false”.
Skepticism is not conspiratorial thinking, of course. I meant it in the most narrow way — many people in this thread believe, without evidence, that some group of people is consciously coordinating massive distortions of news to further specific ends.
Lot of people think that all the media are lying to them but some random guy on a website ranting about chemtrails or globalists is the one true news source.
> random guy on a website ranting about chemtrails or globalists is the one true news source.
Seymour Hersh, Jeff Gerth and the CJR, Wemple at the WaPo, Chris Hedges (ex-NYT Middle East bureau chief, ex-NYT Balkans bureau chief during the Yugoslav wars.)
Not to mention recent nonpersons like Taibbi or Greenwald.
You were required to read and believe what these people wrote in order to get your liberal card in the very recent past, but for having the wrong opinions on rising nationalism they get demoted to "random guys."
I don't see a conspiracy at all. Sentiment analysis of the news shows a strong shift to fear and anger. Those emotions drive engagement. People here didn't like when the Facebook news feed was surfacing these things to the top to drive engagement, but seem to be more OK with human editors doing it.
