Jan 182017

Oh how I hate the media. Are they TRYING to help Trump?

This article leads with DeVos’s Gun vs Bears comment. (“I will refer back to Sen. [Mike] Enzi and the school he was talking about in Wyoming. I think probably there, I would imagine that there is probably a gun in the schools to protect from potential grizzlies.”) It’s also the highlight line under the picture when you share on Facebook: “She wouldn’t say guns don’t belong in schools–and cited a school’s need to protect itself from “potential grizzlies.” Bears, that is.”

That just means she’s really shitty at social posturing. We all know the correct PR answer is “Guns never belong in schools!” and then to demure and say “of course some exceptions can be made in extreme situations, such as to protect our children from rampaging bears.” The fact that she was honest and led with “Well sometimes guns are necessary” shouldn’t be a strike against her. I prefer honesty over political double-talk.

In fact, this makes me sympathize with her very much, because I hate bullshit. So when the rest of the article goes on to point out how absolutely clueless and incompetent she is, I’m now asking myself “How much of this is true, and how much is it the source doing it’s best to smear her?”

But I guess having a snappy “omg she’s scared of bears and loves guns everywhere cuz of it” line will get more people to click through. At least that must be the media’s expectation. It SURE got me talking about it, and linking it! It’s Moloch, in the flesh. I wish there was some way to discourage/punish this sort of behavior.

  6 Responses to “All about dem clicks”

  1. Nope, the system is functioning as intended. Untill post labor robot comunism comes to fix it this kinda stuff has half as been the case and will continue to do so.

  2. Watching her fail to answer questions from several different senators was what made me lose any confidence that she is an adequate choice, not any headlines or articles.

  3. No matter how I look at it, the media can’t go on the way it is. But I can’t even imagine what a good version would look like, given that humans prefer to consume media that flatters their preconceptions and prefer to share things that promote strong in-group/out-group identities. Money to pay journalists has to come from somewhere, after all.

  4. There is! Newspapers used to be very “click”baity. Then subscriptions became the norm, and newspapers had enough steady and predictable income that they could actually write better articles, and people subscribed to ones that provided better quality.

    Full disclosure: I don’t put my money where my mouth is and do not pay subscription money for news sites.

    • Oh! That is very interesting… I sometimes feel like our entire information stream (which is basically The Internet at this point) needs a massive revamp. Advertising is one of the worst ways to fund things of public importance. :/

  5. A german blog I read ( https://blog.fefe.de/ ) stops linking to certain news sites when
    a) they do something he considers inacceptable
    b) they ask him to not link to them (because when he does it’s sometimes comparable to a minor DDoS attack, with thousands of people clicking the link within minutes)

    I don’t know how many clicks the news sites lose by not getting linked by him but I guess it’s noticeable, even it it’s a small percentage.

    And I think the same would work for users too. If you notice a trend of news sites reporting falsely or with heavy bias stop using that site, at least for a while. Most people already do this for the news sites spewing propaganda of their out-group, people should simply start doing the same for the news sites of their ingroup.
    Because in the end, if they can make money off it they will continue to do the same.

    I’m a bit worried about how they analyze their clicks though. They might see “Oh this article got a lot of clicks, we haven’t had an article with that many clicks since then, we should try to put up more like this” and it might increase the amount of badly researched clickbaity articles in the short run.

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