I don't believe there's something along the lines of a conspiracy or anything nearly as dramatic as that, but it does surprise me how little the whole 'enrageme

I don't believe there's something along the lines of a conspiracy or anything nearly as dramatic as that, but it does surprise me how little the whole 'enragement is engagement' dynamic gets brought up in discussions around COVID coverage. Half the world being scared shitless of COVID and the other half being scared shitless of being plunged into yet another lockdown means lots of people doomscrolling news sites past ad after ad. There's no real incentive not to sensationalise things, if later things turned out to be not so bad as the media outlet claimed they a) still get their ad revenue and b) nobody will care in a week's time when the next inevitable scandal happens and the news cycle moves on. If they choose to be cautious and not sensationalise things and it later turns out to be worse than reported then that's a lot of panicky, desperate scrolling not to get a slice of. I'm actually flirting with the belief that the post-War on Terror 24/7 news cycle combined with the above incentives is doing Western society a huge amount of avoidable harm. I'm not sure how this issue can be solved to be honest, while my go-to answer is to have a strictly apolitical regulatory board which can demand retractions are published (after a transparent investigation) with the same headline prominence and ad spend as the initial article or video that was deemed to be alarmist or misleading but that has problems in itself; such a system introduces a "who is fit to determine objective truth?" debate where the regulatory board could determine 2 + 2 = 5 and there'd be very little that could be done to oppose this obvious falsehood.