I think you nailed it. Everything was moving to this direction for a long time, but having 24 hours news let people optimize such headlines faster than before,

I think you nailed it. Everything was moving to this direction for a long time, but having 24 hours news let people optimize such headlines faster than before, and the internet made it possible to optimize millions of headlines. This is a trend that’s been existing for a while, and since now we have better tools to experiment as a society the progress of this trend is accelerating.