For some time now, CNN has been my go-to source for general news. Unfortunately, they’ve shown an increasingly annoying tendency to clickbait their headlines.
It all started out innocently enough with the fluff pieces that no one is really interested in. You know, “Two strangers met on a flight to Paris. Find out what happened next.” (Answer: who cares?) But then they started doing it for borderline real new pieces that didn’t seem to be generating enough traffic, usually because the headline basically told you the entire story. You could actually watch the headline evolve over the course of the day from “Canada places ban on imported moose meat” to “This country has stopped importing moose meat” to try and entice more readers. (Better solution: try reporting real news.)
But CNN outdid themselves the other day with this headline associated with the attempted Trump assassination:
Photographer who took iconic photo of bullet near Trump’s ear explains how he got the picture
For starters, how can this photo possibly be iconic? It’s at most one goddamn day old. Iconic photos are ones that have stood the test of time, not hours. Had the photographer actually gotten a shot of the bullet just as it was about to hit Trump and not of one that just whizzed by him, then come back and talk me. But in this day and age where every event is “historic”, I suppose every photo has to be “iconic” too.
More importantly, how long does it take the average person to say “dumb luck” or “I just pressed the button”? Seriously. What else do you expect the photographer to say? “I waited for the sound of the gunshot and then counted to a thousandth of a second before pulling the trigger myself”?
Apparently, however, it takes CNN an entire three minutes and 34 seconds to say it. (Unfortunately, finding that little bit of information out required me to click on the link, thereby reinforcing their use of that clickbait headline.) Maybe (hopefully) there’s more to the video than just the explanation, but then modify the obvious, stupid headline and save the bonehead catchline for the two moose exporting themselves from Canada to Paris.
The Blog About Fog 