Do Clickbait Headlines Hurt Journalists’ Credibility?
Many journalists use clickbait headlines to gain more clicks and draw more viewers to their story — is this ultimately hurting their journalistic credibility?
Here’s a great example of a clickbait title from Evie Fordham, a journalist at Fox News. She claims that Biden’s White House has “ties to dark money so he can pack the supreme court”, but the reality is that the article talks about the Sixteen Thirty Fund, an organization that donates money to left-wing causes. This is pretty ironic, because there is plenty of right-wing groups doing the same thing, and one is even called “Senate Leadership Fund” that donated 166M dollars to right-wing causes last year. Personally I’m not a fan of huge corporate donations on either side, but come on, how can you call it “dark money to pack the supreme courts” when one side does it then be silent when the other side does?
Here’s a tweet from Katrina Pierson, who is a right-wing activist and was Donald Trump’s spokesperson in 2016. In this tweet, she criticizes one of the co-founders of BLM for buying a home in a “virtually all white area.” The point of this tweet is to point say “See, she is using BLM money to purchase homes in white neighborhoods instead of helping black communities, what a hypocrite!” This tweet is designed to take the viewer’s attention away from the positive things BLM has accomplished, like raising over 12 million dollars in grants to fight, so they can instead be outraged at this supposed hypocrisy.
Here’s a tweet from CNN that criticizes Republican donors for gathering down the road from his home in Mar-a-Lago, saying they are still loyal to former President Trump. While this does seem a bit odd, I’m not sure that simply meeting down the road from his home constitutes loyalty from donors to the former President. The article even states “The Palm Beach location was a concession of convenience to Trump”, so it seems that this clickbait title is designed to make the readers think this is happening. If one didn’t read the article, they would likely believe this was happening based on the headline alone.
Below are a few more examples of clickbait headlines designed to make the reader think/feel a certain way.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CNYqeK-h9tI/
Headline: “The New American Airlines”, implying that the company is now a leftwing action committee because they are embracing equity for Asian employees.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CNeJF2uAFqW/
Here’s one from OAN implying that left-leaning folks think trees are racist.
And here’s a meme from a Flickr user that is repeating the disproven lie that the election was stolen. This may not be from a journalist, but it certainly has a clickbait headline! And below that is a link to a story where John McCain says Obama is “directly responsible for the Orlando terrorist attack.” The words “directly responsible” should be reserved for, you know, the person who did the shooting?
So there you have it, lots of clickbait headlines designed to persuade the user to think and feel a certain way (not unlike propaganda!) To answer the question I proposed in my headline, I do think clickbait headlines do hurt journalists’ credibility — but only if the reader is willing to dissect the information and determine whether what’s presented to them is biased. Lucky for many of these journalists, most people aren’t willing to do this work so they can get away with using these clickbait headlines. What do you think? Are these sorts of headlines hurting journalists’ credibility?
