While my purview of interests and knowledge generally only circles around the entertainment industry—being an aspiring screenwriter myself—my eyes have been opened this past year to a trend of journalism that extends even to my realm of interest: clickbait journalism.
Clickbait refers to “content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page.” Now, I’d been aware of the term but only as it related to YouTube content and YouTube-ers who titled their videos in an alluring way to get more views. I was unaware (or perhaps simply blind to the fact) that there could be an entire type of journalism centered around this clickbait mentality. Yet, as 2016 continued on I made this discovery for myself upon reading the unrelenting negativity of film reviews; specifically, the swarm of negativity that surrounded the mega blockbuster film “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.” While I greatly enjoyed the film I understood why others would feel differently about it and even expected the negative reviews for a variety of specific reasons related to the state of comic book films these days. However, as press for the film continued I couldn’t help but notice that this negativity somehow became an entity of its own, something that was actively being published across the internet for questionable purposes.
The most noticeable moment of this I recall was seeing an article on the front page of Yahoo at the beginning of the second weekend of the film’s release. This article’s title was something along the lines of: “Batman v. Superman plummets in its second weekend in the box office.” I clicked on the article and began to peruse it when I noticed that the article had been posted on Friday, before the weekend’s box office numbers were even finalized. The article began with the box office predictions and detailing the film’s negative Rotten Tomatoes score and other negative feedback on the film. Then there were listed a series of updates as the weekend went on that ultimately ended saying that the film had actually performed pretty well in its second weekend, it’s fall in numbers exactly on par with all other second weekends of films that debuted in the same month in the past years; even noting that the film had actually performed BETTER than “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” in its second weekend.
Que my jaw drop. I realized that the entire article, or at least the original premise of it, had been a complete lie. I was floored that a reputable news outlet would publish an article with a misleading and unfounded title and byline without having all the facts to back it up; that, in fact, the end of the article had actually illustrated the exact opposite of what its title had. In this article, as well as others, there had actually been a lack of focus on the fact that the film’s revenue had been $872.7 million and for a budget of $250 million this would be considered a success. I came to the conclusion that during the film’s first week of release it became “in vogue” to speak about the film negatively and that Yahoo had gone along with this trend and contributed a negative byline so as to lure as many people as possible to click on it. Then I started to wonder, do these people truly think this negatively about this film or are they simply trying to create a revenue? While there is no tangible proof that the answer to this question is yes, I believe wholeheartedly that it is.
After this epiphany, I began to regard all other film reviews with caution. My continued awareness throughout the year actually brought upon another observation. In addition to receiving all my information about the goings-on within the entertainment industry through a specific entertainment news outlet I witness all of their publication of reviews; as 2016 came to a close I realized that 90% of their reviews throughout the year had been negative ones, or rather, that their review headlines and bylines were negative. In fact, even their critiques of award nominated and award-winning films were, for the most part, negative. While it certainly isn’t new for a critique to be harsh I do believe that it is new to see such a high number of bad reviews. For all I know some of the reviews might not have been entirely condemning of their films seeing as I avoided clicking on every single one of these articles so as not to contribute any support to this method of journalism, but they were certainly advertising as such. And while it wasn’t culturally fashionable to hate on every single film they wrote negatively about, there remains the simple and unfortunate truth about human nature: negativity is more contagious than positivity.
We all know that we as humans get a good amount of pleasure from witnessing negative interactions, whether from Twitter battles between Taylor Swift and Katy Perry or from your own life. In the end these sorts of things will draw more attention than a positive love fest. This has been proven in the past with William Randolph Hearst and the New York Journal in the late 19th century, as his sensationalized reporting (especially accredited to the Spanish-American War) drove up the Journal’s circulation and lead to the creation of the term yellow journalism; journalism known as “that which exploits, distorts, or exaggerates news to create sensations and attract readers.” Sound familiar?
While yellow journalism had been used to increase circulation and as such is only really related to print media, the modern era’s entrance into the technological world of news has adopted a new form of yellow journalism: clickbait. For, nowadays it’s the clicks that matter more than the subscriptions.
It is curious then to me that while yellow journalism is freely and often regarded with great criticism that there is not as widespread acknowledgement and similar condemnation for clickbait journalism. I fear that this is because not enough people are aware of it. I certainly wasn’t before this past year. Therefore, I want—and need—to advise caution when reading anything and everything printed online these days. While clickbait journalism isn’t starting or contributing to any wars, it does have the potential to affect businesses like the arts because it has the ability to influence public opinion. For example, during the time of “Batman v Superman” I witnessed masses of ordinary people whose opinions of the film were all exactly the same, and this was because it was what was being repeated continuously in every negative critique of the film. In all my years of staying informed on films and their reviews from critics and public alike I had never witnessed such identical opinions.
Therefore, it is important to notice this era of clickbait so that we are all able to make our own opinions. Listen to others but also question, are these opinions authentic? Above all exercise caution and think critically before clicking because we have the ability to affect change simply by the movement of every mouse.
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