We know classic clickbait when we see it. ONE SIMPLE TRICK! YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT SHE LOOKS LIKE NOW! You don’t fall for that spammy, hyperventilating marginalia—except maybe when the claim is so outrageous, or the mystery so tantalizing, that you still can’t help but click through. (“Touché,” I think, when I meet a blizzard of ads and no sign of the promised HOTTEST MUGSHOTS.)
This week, the Associated Press gets a warning for using clickbait tactics where they couldn’t belong less: on the already misinformation-plagued front lines of healthcare reporting.
During a White House press conference on Monday, President Donald Trump—flanked by MAHA conspiracist-in-chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—underscored the debunked link between vaccines and autism and announced that the Food and Drug Administration would be discouraging pregnant women from taking acetaminophen, the main ingredient in Tylenol, because of a purported link to autism diagnoses.
Which of the below is a real AP headline published after the conference?
Five Theories Behind the Link Between Vaccines and Autism
What We Know About Autism’s Causes and Any Potential Link to Tylenol
What Evidence Is There that Tylenol Use in Pregnancy May Cause Autism?
Answer here.
A headline like this one doesn’t look like clickbait on its face—it looks like a sober explainer. But it’s insidiously prioritizing the same thing as any YOU WON’T BELIEVE story: the generation of enough curiosity or alarm to get a click-through, regardless of the potential for misleading the reader. There is no substantiated causal link between Tylenol use and autism rates. To use a headline that uncritically raises the question of whether there’s a there there, even if the article’s text answers no*, is to nudge wider the Overton window of conspiracy discourse, creating yet more smoke where there is no fire.
* The article in question barely answers no: it gives us, absent any citations, “Some studies have raised the possibility that taking the over-the-counter painkiller in pregnancy might be associated with a risk of autism—but many others haven’t found a connection.” For a better-cited rundown of relevant research (and a useful discussion of the difference between “association” and “cause”) see here.
I just don't understand why most current news publications, not excluding the tv coverage, will not just state the facts. The headlines have been misleading readers for decades now. Are they so afraid of what will ensue if they happen to print the truth? Slanted and basically false news coverage seems to be the norm now and it is no wonder that there is so much misinformation out there. There needs to be a gold standard, when it comes to reporting, and playing down actual facts to make the news more palatable to the public, is helping to create ignorant and uninformed readers, who take that information and vote accordingly. We don't need news explained, because that subjects the reader to false and more often than not biased views. I am missing Walter Conkrite and that generation of newsmen, who laid out the facts and let us form our own opinions about what we heard and read. News analysis has its place but should not become our only source of information.
Most of what gets published or broadcast by corporate "news" outlets isn't journalism at all, but merely disseminating corporate and political PR. If there are any actual journalists left in the corporate media, most aren't being allowed to practice their craft, because we are constantly subjected to diametrically opposed statements without any indication as to which is closer to reality. And unless they had some education in science or medicine, most journalists aren't prepared to accurately report on such issues.
Without context, "he said, she said" is NOT journalism, but rather little more than gossip. Sure, there are plenty of complicated cases in which we don't know which of two or more possibilities are true, but far more common are reports in which one statement is correct and the opposing statement is false based on all available evidence. If that is the case and is NOT pointed out in a report, that's not news. And a "fact-check" in a separate release is no substitute.