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Surprised, but not surprised, that Business Insider would run an ambiguous, panicky headline in a time like this. Imagine if web journalism wasn't funded by cli
by vwcx 7y ago
Surprised, but not surprised, that Business Insider would run an ambiguous, panicky headline in a time like this. Imagine if web journalism wasn't funded by clicks and precision of headline/reporting was the metric that mattered.
- endorphone 7y agoTheir headline, which was probably too long for HN, is entirely accurate. It would be useful if people stopped blaming the media without verifying first.
- vwcx 7y agoSure, their headline is accurate, but the way it is written creates ambiguity by relegating the factual turn to the end. Headlines are often skimmed and propagated. Unless every viewer reads the headline in full and every aggregator replicates it exactly, the headline may be misleading. Journalists aim for clarity in communication, an ethos that is infringed on increasingly more as web-only publications live or die off clicks. I agree that we shouldn't "blame the media", but we can blame Business Insider for playing with ambiguity in this headline's structure.
- tedunangst 7y agoHow would you word it? Other than medical supplies to its warehouses suspending all shipments Amazon is amid coronavirus crisis?
- endorphone 7y agoThis is absurdly demanding. The headline is clear. The article is clear. But because someone can draw the wrong conclusion you blame the media? Give me a break. And I'll take All The Downvotes -- this current trend of blaming media for everything is absolute horseshit. Yesterday I watched everyone claim the media caused the run on masks and hand sanitizer...by reporting on the shortage after the fact. And the run on grocery stores...by reporting on the runs after the fact. People love blaming the messenger. People love believing that correlation=causation. The media reports that the DJIA dropped = clearly the media made it drop (and not the enormous number of indicators pointing to bad times ahead). And it would be harmless -- if incredibly stupid -- but in this spirit of blaming the media for everything there exists a vacuum in which actual liars and exploiters fill the void. See: The Trump administration. MAGA. Absolute vile human beings like Limbaugh. This is what "Hurr the media isn't saying what I want in exactly the way I want" creates.
- jjeaff 7y agoSo not only are we not expecting people to read the articles, we have to also expect them not to read to the end of the headline? If the average reader doesn't even have the reading comprehension and attention span to read to the end of the headline, I don't think any amount of baby fooding of information is going to make any difference.
- smacktoward 7y agoImagine if people were willing to pay for journalism that prioritized accuracy over sensationalism.
- rbritton 7y agoWhich one disappeared first? An audience willing to pay for quality journalism or quality journalism? I suspect quality journalism declined first, and it declined to the point where it made customers skeptical of journalism in general. That then shrunk the audience, and it circled back around again in a continuing cycle.
- smacktoward 7y agoI am consistently impressed by the rationales people develop for not being willing to pay for the product they say they want.
- gambler 7y agoYeah, sure, the fact that many journalists are consistently choosing to publish blatant lies, propaganda and click-bait garbage are all the fault of their readers, the Internet or maybe "capitalism". But not the journalists themselves.
- endorphone 7y ago"the fact that many journalists are consistently choosing to publish blatant lies, propaganda and click-bait garbage" They aren't, of course. You're apparently just incredibly gullible to people's last-ditch-defense of claiming it's all fake news. The Trump administration, and its many absolutely cretinous hanger-ons, are quite the abusers of this. "Fake news!" Only in every case it ends up being completely accurate.
- Loughla 7y ago>Only in every case it ends up being completely accurate. What I've noticed, anecdotally, is that Fake News is screamed at me when the story is accurate, but isn't parsed like a legal document. So "Jim said he would kill all the sparrows" is the headline, but because Jim said "he would kill every sparrow" and not literally "all" the sparrows, FAKE NEWS. It's absolutely infuriating.