Left, Center, Right: How Click Bait is Ruining Relationships, Your Soul & Spreading Falsehoods for Profit
The Case for Eliminating Headlines in the Media
I’m not even sure how it happened, or which box was inadvertently checked for me, but somehow I ended up on the official communications email distribution list for everything that Vice President J.D. Vance says in any sort of official public setting. Most mornings, my everyday routine after coffee and my Bible devotional is to mindlessly sort through my email inbox, deleting mostly junk emails that I don’t even know what or how they got there. It’s like getting the mail these days, where I swear 90% is junk and maybe 10% is stuff I actually need or want to know. Yes, I know, investing in some sort of email unsubscribe service would prob add hours back to my life - add it to my to-do list.
Must have been a slow day, but I found myself the other morning instead of reflexively deleting a recent email from The Office of Vice President Vance, opening the email and reading it in it’s entirety.
This email was not a political push for fundraising as I had assumed, it was not a pitch for me to support some cause or even a favorable recap of something good the Vice President had accomplished the day before, but rather it was raw annotated notes for a speech he had given the morning prior at a breakfast for Catholics.
It read like a script.
No media commentary. Nothing redacted, framed, or spun to make me feel any sort of way. Just a literal transcript of exactly what happened at this event.
I’m new to the world of official political email distribution lists, so maybe this is a practice that has existed with previous administrations I’m not sure, but regardless, I was impressed. I don’t track nearly everything in the news, but as far as I could tell, this particular event wasn’t reported by the mainstream (or even independent) media in the days following. No headlines circulated, no social media post - not even a picture of what anyone was wearing.
It was simply the raw transcript from the event.
Clearly, a secretary or robot was sitting to the side, unbiasedly documenting what went down in the room - making sure to annotate candor, tripped over words, and even crowd responses and interactions, albeit anonymous.
Since then, I realized these exact type of emails come from his office almost daily.
Today for example, it appears as though VP Vance delivered an address to US Marines and their families at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia. Here’s a snippet from the email I received, and his speech:
If you have a basic understanding of VP Vance’s verbal cadence and his general demeanor while speaking, then it’s easy to “hear” his tone for this speech simply by reading the notes. These aren’t press releases, they’re just long-form communication of what actually happened.
While long-form media and communication is definitely having a resurgence, our brains in the digital age have been trained and wired to mostly only consume snippets of things and essentially “cliff notes”. This can be problematic because much can be missed, or misunderstood, when parts of the story/event, are not told in their entirety. It’s why I started this Substack as a long-form way for us to flesh out in more depth things around politics, wellness, pop culture, and Jesus - weaving them all together in ways that you simply cannot do in a 60 second IG reel or story.
We need the whole story to understand, well, the whole story. We also need the entire context if we want to make our own subjective opinions about policies, speeches, events, or really anything.
Like many of you, I scroll through social each day - favoring IG stories more than any other channel - and political commentary is common content. As an independent voter this last election, I worked hard to really seek a true understanding of both sides of what was happening, filter that through my own personal convictions and what my gut instincts were telling me and I was experiencing in my everyday environment, in order to make the best informed decision I could at the time. It wasn’t until my family relocated from a blue to a red state, and I bravely dipped my toe into adding alternative news sources into my vernacular that I realized how deeply influenced my environment and the outlets I received news from were conditioning me to think a certain way. The result was going from previously having a physical visceral reaction to the words ‘DONALD TRUMP’ to ultimately being able to show up near the end of the campaign trail to a DJT-sponsored political rally.
It was only after I was able to calm my nervous system enough to even hear other opinions, which ultimately helped me to weigh out and sort through the things I had previously been told were objective ‘truth’ and morally ‘right’. Turns out, when you objectively listen to both sides, you come out with different conclusions and opinions. Who knew? ;)
Like many Americans I assume, I don’t have personal relationships with any of our federal politicians. If I want to stay current on things politically, I have to rely on second-hand information fed through varying media sources.
The problem is, the bias belonging to each of those sources is full of extremes, and finding objective TRUTH feels like a lost art.
There are very clearly TWO sides. While that’s not new information, I find even news outlets “in the center” tend to have a slight lean one way or the other - this is human nature. If you want neutral, or plain truth - good luck!
Where I see this being more problematic is when we allow the headlines, or the leans of our news sources to infiltrate our hearts & our minds, influencing us in ways that are either causing us anxiety ourselves OR providing fuel for us to begin spouting off harmful rhetoric directed toward others who may have differing opinions. Because regardless of how silo-d one chooses to insulate themselves, inevitably, there are people whom you love in your life, who don’t agree with everything that you do. And especially as believers, this is potentially harmful to our ultimate call to love our neighbor as ourself…even the ones who disagree with us.
A friend recently posted a headline with sentiments declaring “We were going backwards as a society” and with genuine emotion appealed to Christians to fight for what is ‘right’. The implication was that unless you believed the same as her on this issue, and supported in the same manner, you were ‘wrong’. I read the entire article of which she merely posted the headline - again to seek genuine understanding - and was disheartened with what I found. The headline was pure clickbait, where the body of the article very explicitly clarified the world was not ending (for lack of a better term). In other words, if the sentiment of the headline was “Everything is going to hell and this is atrocious”, buried deep in the body of the article the journalist more objectively articulated “sort of, but not really - but MAYBE IT COULD go to hell”.
But the damage was done. The headline triggered an emotional response (preying on what Allie Beth Stuckey calls Toxic Empathy), and my well-intentioned God fearing friend, took the bait pleading to her Christian friends to stand up against the current administration on this specific issue. If I land in a different camp than her, does that make me wrong? Is it even a matter of right and wrong? The media sure does want you to think it is.
Left, right, or center - we actually share a common enemy right now: THE MEDIA.
Headlines like this are what make up nearly the entirety of journalism right now. Algorithms are in place most everywhere we seek news, and they have intentionally been manipulated to hold your attention as long as they can. As a mass communications major, I have a hard time even calling today’s digital media sources “journalism” because my teaching in college was principled more on the style of AI notes generated from JD Vance’s speech above versus the highly opinionated spun pieces we’re inundated with today. Modern journalism has eclipsed the type of reporting that we were taught, and that our parents were raised with, and instead has morphed into a new industry driven by and for clicks. Today’s media is a FOR PROFIT business, and their product is FEAR.
Everything is about clicks. What is the craziest, most attention-grabbing headline or spin on an event that will stop your scroll and grab your attention? FEAR.
Traditional media is expected to rake in nearly $2 trillion in revenue this year alone. According to the Pew Research Group, CNN reported $1.8 billion in PROFIT in 2022. Granted that revenue is primarily through advertising, but advertisers will not strike a deal unless the network can prove they have an audience. Bigger the number of eyeballs, bigger the ad dollars will be. How do they generate an audience? They write and produce content to suck you in. Your attention is their commodity and make no mistake, they know all the psychology behind how to trigger you. They write with deep intention.
Fear, clickbait, and writing things to rile up your emotions is BIG BUSINESS. The ‘good ones’ wrap their bias-spun clickbait with enough sprinkled facts that you FEEL like their reporting is legitimate. They’re backed by legitimate mainstream networks so you assume credibility. Oftentimes, many of them are granted access to be at these speeches and events, and as humans consuming the information second-hand we naturally assume good-intent. We don’t assume deceit or partial truths to serve an agenda because we don’t intimately understand the BUSINESS of media today. But make no mistake, both their job and the directives from their editors, are to RILE YOU UP. That is 100% the intent of the product they are producing.
And it’s WORKING.
We’ve lost our ability to critically think and instead digest what is hand-fed to us as Bible truth. We no longer ask ourselves, “Why do I believe what I believe (about this administration for example)? Is it because the media told me to feel that way, or because I drew that conclusion from the horse’s mouth on my own?”
It is frustrating to watch good, God-fearing people I KNOW, fall right into the trap of mainstream media’s fear porn. I hear and see the very real STRESS, anxiety, and overall distress consuming these fear-based spins on political events are causing them in their real actual life. Far away events, reported to them second hand are causing very real stress and anxiety in their real everyday life. Some simply internalize that stress and others use it as fuel to make verbal attacks online toward “other” or to draw their line deeper, believing they are surely on the RIGHT side.
Just as an example, it’s important if you are traditionally left-leaning to understand that the underlying philosophy of a Republican administration and belief-system is SMALL government. Whereas Democrats believe philosophically in BIG government. These two philosophies are diabolically different from one another, and from where I stand, not a matter of right and wrong - but rather difference in belief systems.1 Our country has been under mostly left-leaning officials for the bulk of the last 20 years, thus government programs and reach has expanded to unprecedented levels for our country’s history. In contrast, to make good on what the American people voted for, naturally there are going to be cuts within the government because a Republican philosophy is to have small government, with more power in the hands of the people and states. You may not agree with that philosophy - that’s fine! But maybe it might be helpful to understand and not be shocked (read: outraged) when many government programs are cut. As of now, I don’t know any Republicans who are outraged or surprised by any major policy actions this administration has enacted the last several months. The outrage, to my knowledge so far, has only come from those who never voted for him in the first place or who philosophically believe differently. That’s okay and shouldn’t be a surprise! It’s problematic though when we spin those philosophical differences into moral attacks or worse, allowing these things way out of our control to internalize in our nervous systems and souls. To objectively understand the other side, means to help regulate your own nervous system, and proceed forward sans outrage and stress. You can still oppose it - no big - but maybe you can do so in more healthy way, that doesn’t disregulate your nervous system or attack (indirectly) people you love.
What would our political climate look like if we simply eliminated headlines? What would your emotions look like if the media didn’t tell you how to feel on politics, but rather the interpretation was left up to you if we only received raw notes like I did from JD Vance? What if paid people with an intentionally nefarious (profitable) agenda weren’t the ones interpreting political happenings for you, but you were left to interpret them for yourself? How would that impact your mental health and your approach to your friends & neighbors?
Maybe it’s too much of a dystopian wish to take away the ability for media to be a FOR PROFIT business and replaced with neutral AI who provided the everyday American an unbiased, annotated script of an event, but man I can’t help but wonder if it might encourage the dust to settle a bit, for curiosity to grow, and for our humanity toward one another to rise again. If instead of starting or ending our day with ‘THE SKY IS FALLING’ type headlines, we just focused on the people right in front of us, loving them, loving God, and living out our individual purposes for good.
For now, wishful thinking is all I have but hopefully this can be a reminder that the job of news outlets like MSNBC, Politico, NBC, or Fox News is to garner your attention long enough to cash in on the affiliates or advertisers on their particular websites. Clicks are measured and these metrics help drive revenue for the media companies. Right now, the power sits with the right so the left is in an uproar. That power will switch at some point and we’ll have the reverse true. In short, these media companies will continue to exploit the rollercoaster of emotions that a changing guard can conjure up through their clickbait headlines in order to turn a profit. There is no journalistic DUTY to report objective facts. They are there to turn a profit - and as we’ve seen over the last several years - by any means necessary. Fear sells, plain and simple.
My best tool to keep my wits about me politically without completely burying my head in the sand is simply to recognize the business model for what it is, to seek multiple interpretations of events, to remain curious about the stories of my actual friends and family who have different opinions about current events, and most of all, to guard and protect my heart by any means necessary when/if I ever feel those hedges of protection begin to falter. I also am REALLY good at using the MUTE button on social media when it seems someone I love has lost control over their emotions around politics and is instead weaponizing things like scripture to support their own righteousness. I’ve never subscribed to the binary line of thinking that to be Christian meant you had to be a Democrat or Republican. Our stories are way too nuanced for that, and frankly, God finds it laughable and ultimately heartbreaking.
Because regardless of current events, there will come a day when we reach the pearly gates and God says what did you do with what I gave you? He won’t hold you accountable for helping all the hurting people in far off lands, but he will for those entrusted to you in your own home, in your own sphere of influence, and the resources he gave you for them. In your actual everyday life.
And if anyone sees a petition going around to Make Media Neutral Again, please send it my way?
What are your thoughts on the incessant fear-mongering - both subtle and overt - by the media?
Comment below - I’d love to hear what you’re thinking and seeing!
Uber-conservatives or Uber-liberals will fully disagree with me I’m sure that this is not a matter of right and wrong, and I can already see the Biblical references conservatives could use to support their stance. I’m writing this as objectively as I can so this is not speaking for my own stance but high level general terms.