As I have written many times in the past, I have long been entranced by newspapers. You might, quite rightly, accuse me of being addicted to them. It has been that way since I was in elementary school and would drop by the local newspaper office to watch the reporters in action. The sports writer, Benny, was old school – always wore a fedora inside, smoked cigars, typed with two fingers, and kept a bottle of cheap whiskey in the bottom right drawer of a desk. He knew who fixed boxing matches and had a coded list of the more reliable area bookies. Benny was so much more interesting that most of my parent’s white-bread and respectable friends. For some foolish reason, the Olds did not think he was a good influence on me.
I once said that a day away from Saugatuck is a day wasted. So is a day without at least one newspaper, printed on paper or on-line. Maybe it is worse.
To my irritation, many newspapers and much of the electronic news media has become annoying at times. For one thing, there are so many people in this racket that sometimes reporters, broadcasters, and writers have to resort to writing about each other at an event instead of the event itself. One example came at both major political party conventions where there were more reporters than delegates, and some of the reporters were reduced to reporting on the clothing styles of their fellow reporters. When it gets to the point they write about shoe laces, you know some of them are desperate to get any story done ahead of their deadline.
Therein is the challenge of what is now called “click bait.” Click bait is almost parallel to banner newspaper headlines that tell the truth but are intentionally misleading. The whole purpose of a headline is to catch the reader’s attention and seduce them into reading the story. Click bat is much the same, except its purpose is to get the reader to expect a lot more than can be delivered.
There is a purpose to this. The more readers a columnist has, the more readers the newspaper can claim. That means more advertising revenue. The more click bait an e-story captures, the more revenue someone makes. For example, if Taylor Swift publishes something, she gets millions of followers, and eventually that translates into more money. If I write something, well, trust me, there will not be much money because I do not have that many followers.
Television and radio news do it all the time, and it seems to work. They will announce “we’ll be right back at a word from our sponsors, to tell you if this weekend’s weather will be this year’s blizzard of the century.” It invariably works: We suffer through a commercial for the news.
All of which is why writers resort to click bait. A classic example came in late August when an e-headline stated, “If candidate XYZ loses there will be a civil war.” All right, that caught my attention. Civil war does not seem like a good thing, so 23 had better see what is predicted. It turned out that the story was that if XYZ loses the election there will be divisions and a ‘civil war’ within that person’s political party. There is a big difference, but readers were taken in by the click-bait headline.
In the past, especially before e-journalism, we had click-bait in a different form. It was gossip, and it could be just as devastating and hurtful.
We have all been reading and hearing about the wild-hair stories of Haitians who have moved to a small town in Ohio, and the fear mongering against the immigrants because they were eating dogs, cats, pets, and geese. There is nothing new about it. In reality, it was race hatred for someone new and different.
For many years the Wong family had their Chinese restaurant in retail building owned by my father. They did a good business and were highly respected. Then, in the 1970s, after the war in Viet Nam ended, a number of Hmong and Vietnamese refugees moved into Rochester, Minnesota. In due course a Hmong family opened a restaurant at a strip mall. Before long, the same rumors coming out of Ohio were being told of them. The mystery meat included dogs, cats, rats, and other animals.
The Hmongs and Vietnamese, like most new immigrants, had not warmly welcome. They looked different, their customs were different, their language was different. Soon, there were panicked warnings that they were going to steal American jobs and take over the city and then the country.
We have had all that nonsense before with the new immigrants: Irish, Germans, Italians, Russians, and everyone else. It is garbage, pure and simple. Even so, the rumor mill and the wild stories, sometimes enhanced with a few high-test adult drinks, can do tremendous damage.
One day on the way home for lunch, my father pulled into their parking lot and went into the restaurant through the back door and straight into the kitchen. He looked around and did not see any evidence of dogs, cats, or anything else of that nature being prepared. One of the younger members of the family who spoke some English told him they did not cook that sort of food.
That was sufficient for Father so he thanked them and said that rumors like the ones he had heard were bad for business, bad for Rochester, and made the country look bad. After lunch, he went to work. A quiet word with Benny at the newspaper, even if he was a sportswriter, got a story about the restaurant in the sports section. The next day it was picked up by a news reporter and in the front section. In no uncertain terms, he told his customers who brought up the rumor, that they were wrong and to stop it. Some of his lodge brothers were delivering the same message. In a week or so, the story was all but forgotten.
Gossip, rumors, click bait, or whatever else you might want to call it, is all of the same cloth and it is purely toxic. Sometimes it has to be put down hard and fast; other times the best way of getting rid of it is with a good laugh. Other times a more genteel approach works. When a long-time friend hears one of these damaging stories packed with lies, she tightens her lips, gives an icy death stare, and finally asks, “Really? Is that what you really believe?
I despise misleading, click-bait headlines in newspapers or on the electronic news. I think there is something shoddy about it. In the past it was called “yellow journalism.” That is because it was printed on the cheapest newsprint available – yellowish paper, and the writers and publishers were too cowardly (‘yellow’ as it was called then) to attach their names to the articles.
We get even more than our usual dose about this time every four years when there is an election campaign. Pat and I have decided to ignore all of it. We would rather what an often-repeated Big Pharma or insurance advertisement. We are done with the negativity and attack ads. It no longer interests us. And you are certainly welcome to join us in proclaiming your independence from nastiness and lies.
And, as I have mentioned a number of times in the past, this is one reason I am honored by be writing for the Allegan County News: No click-bait. You might not agree with Mr. Wilcox or any of the other writers, but he has made it clear to kick yellow journalism out the door.
