How Distorted And Fake News In The Age of Click-Bait Makes Life Hard On Citizens [View all]

[HuckleB]

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-age-of-click-bait/

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At the extreme end are sites that make no attempt to report actual news. They make up and report fake news, news items optimized for clicks unhindered by reality. I was recently asked by an SGU listener, for example, about this story about a Spanish man who died of an allergic reaction to a GMO tomato that had a fish gene in it. He was sincerely concerned about the implications of this story for the safety of GMOs.

He had no idea the story was entirely fake. In fact, there are no GMO tomatoes on the market. The insertion of a cold tolerance gene from a Winter Flounder into produce, like strawberries and tomatoes, was a research concept, but was never brought to fruition. The idea, however, has been used for anti-GMO propaganda, and this fake news outlet was just playing on those fears.

This raises another manifestation of the click-bait era that Rawlinson did not cover. He was mostly concerned about real and fake news outlets. There is another type of outlet, however, and that is the narrative-driven outlet. These outlets don’t sell just any click-bait, but rather they are tailoring their click-bait to a particular audience by catering to a certain narrative.

Fox News is perhaps the outlet most people think of when the idea of selling a narrative as news is brought up. The phenomenon is insidious – not only does it reinforce a particular worldview (which admittedly is nothing new) the process is an interactive one between them and their audience. They align their narrative to their target audience, but over time they also align their audience to their narrative.

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