I was taught the inverted pyramid in j-school. (Yes, I’m old.)
The headline was the story. You summarized that story in the first sentence. You put the most important point second. And so on. This let the editor cut it wherever they wanted to make it fit, because the paper was paid when you bought it.
This died in the age of clicks.
Today the headline sells the story. It’s meant to provoke a reaction, usually an angry one. That’s because the outlet no longer stands on its own. Each story must sell itself, and outrage sells.
The first sentence is no longer a summary. It’s an expansion of the headline’s outrage. Subsequent sentences are an endless game of “hide the pickle,” an attempt to obscure the story, tell you it’s right around the corner, while the publisher blasts ads in front of the story, behind the story, and in the middle of the story.
Finally, near the bottom, you get what the story is about. It’s usually about something you read before. In other words, it’s usually not even news.
The trick of reading news today is to skip through most of the story text, and to read several headline versions of the story to learn what it might be about. This is time-consuming, it’s frustrating, and it provokes outrage, aimed at the whole journalism enterprise. Rightfully so.
The Nature of Propaganda
In contrast propaganda is straightforward. It tells you what you’re supposed to feel and keeps telling you that. It gives you dopamine hits with every sentence. Because it’s all about the reaction, never about the information. Propaganda gets more clicks than information for this reason.
This transformation from news to propaganda did not happen all at once. It is behavior publishers learned, from the Internet news market. If your aim is to make money, you must hold the reader’s attention. When the subject is news, you do that by withholding the important bit as long as you can. Or by just engaging in propaganda.
When the whole point is outrage, you don’t have to tell readers anything. You just spin, endlessly, taking the spin to ever-greater heights, becoming more outrageous with every turn of the screw.
This is true on every beat. It’s not just happening in politics. It’s true in business, in sports, in entertainment. Instead of being told what is happening, you’re being told what to feel.
The problem isn’t political. This is a business model problem.
