The Mainstream Press and National Media Became Like Tabloids
Why does (almost) everything in BBC bear a face and sometimes clickbait as headline? Did responsible journalists adopt the tactics of tabloids?
THIS morning we wrote about what happened to Yleisradio Oy (BS machine) and since then we've been asked twice to also comment on what other publishers, even national channels/papers, are doing and saying. One such request said: "Maybe there can be followup articles to the Yle post covering BBC, NRK, PBS/NPR, DR, SR, etc."
The problem is, while overlap exists in their problems/weaknesses, they cannot be treated as identical. Yes, many are not accessible without proprietary JavaScript, many are reporting on things that hardly matter to anyone (it's cheaper), some merely repost articles from other sources, and authors seldom disclose conflicts of interest.
One thing I noticed a year ago in the BillBC (BBC) isn't just political bias, many typos in headlines (suggesting aggressive cuts to the editorial team) and severe factual/technical mistakes. One thing I kept seeing was that in every section - not just sports of "entertainment" - the photographs (in a layout made for phones/"apps", not PCs) almost always depict faces. I would sometimes see faces in 100% of the photographs in the front page. When I look over the wife's shoulder I see her scrolling past faces even when the articles aren't about people. Consider the front page at this very moment:
Why does an article about ticks show a photograph of some person? It's just faces and faces... and more faces... all the way through the front page (maybe 80%-90% of "feature" images - the ones people are meant to click on while scrolling - are mugshots), which... well, reeks of tabloids - an utterly bad way to "consume" news or information. It's exceedingly bad as the images add nothing to the story. To give one example from the front page (right now), "Can a bad night’s sleep impact your IBS?" has a face of a lady in it, i.e. nothing about night or sleep.
The standards of journalism have dropped, even if budgets have not. What's their excuse for this? Optimising for "traffic", "engagement", "mobile", and "social (control) media"? █