Fraud as a viable business model

In the current (th)Ink, Keith Knight lobs a stinkbomb at a deserving target.

I keep seeing stories tagged to HuffPo in my Facebook feed, but, honestly, it's like one of those tired old TV shows that they keep renewing and, when you see it listed on your guide, your response has long since gone from "Well, there's a possibility!" to "Good lord, is that still on?"

When Arianna Huffington sold out to AOL for a large pile of cash, there was some expectation that she would begin to pay for the original content on her site, but she continued to offer "exposure" to all but her nearest and dearest.

Meanwhile, the right rail of the site became devoted to boobs and deceptive headlines, mostly about boobs, intended to attract the clicks of, well, the booboisie. Whom else indeed?

And, as the headlines at HuffPo became more and more hysterical, as the stories became less and less substantial, as the blatant, painful sexism and exploitation became more and more obvious, you would think that readers would drift away.

But, hey, ER continued to get decent ratings even after the departure of every star from the original cast and even after the plot lines began to make the Moldavian massacre on "Dynasty" look like something out of Arthur Miller.

And, similarly, people continue to come to HuffPo, just as the proverbial dog returneth to his proverbial vomit.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice and you've got yourself a viable business model.

Keef is a little behind the times, mind you, because Arianna has, indeed, been paying editors and other key personnel. But, still, yuck and double yuck. It's not just that the site has turned to crap. It's that the site has turned to exploitive, dishonest crap.

But so what?

The "so what?" is that, while commercial media has always been in the business of selling eyeballs, the scramble for clicks has completely overcome any sense of ethics or of any purpose beyond amassing those clicks.

The free press that Jefferson saw as the safety net between civilization and chaos, has come out firmly on the side of chaos. They are not "for" or "against" anything -- they just want clicks, any clicks, at any cost.

And clicks are relatively anonymous, though there are measures such as "unique visitors" that -- if you assume they work -- distinguish between those coming to find out what is happening with the latest hearings into Guantanamo or Syria and those who are just returning to scream "Kenyan socialist" at the person who has just returned to scream "fascist teabagger" in the echo chamber of the comments section.

But you don't need sophisticated analytics when you can just scroll down to the comments themselves, and see the collection of morons that a site has amassed. Many even have assembled a permanent cast of morons who know each other. It's as if "Cheers" were set in a crack house or perhaps a cave in Idaho.

To be fair, however, a substantial portion of on-line advertising seems targeted to morons, so the market apparently exists and there ya go.

But that doesn't make me feel better, and I feel even worse when I read an article on an apparently legitimate mainstream website only to find, at the bottom, "suggested links" to four-month old stories about Miley Cyrus's boobs or to obvious scams about the Five Foods You Should Never Eat.

It has not only come to the point where even legimate news outlets are willing to wallow in the muck, but suddenly we have enough Onion knock-offs that people are passing around graceless satires that, while incompetent as social commentary, function quite well to increase the public's delusional level.

Nobody cares. And, when I say "nobody cares," what I mean is that, when someone points out that a particular story is fake, the response is, "So?"

Facts have become a matter of opinion. Truth was once a trophy, but now everyone gets trophies just for participating.

Back in 1994, I wrote a column in which I talked about how technology was enabling the exploitation of what had up until then been an underplayed, if not insignificant, paranoid element in society.

Among other things, I said:

Here's the rest of it, if you're curious, or even if you're not. Click on it for a readable-size version, or try the full-size PDF. 

I need to go back to Tralfamador and hang out with Montana Wildhack for awhile. This time that I am stuck in simply depresses me.

 

Comments

[Mat]

I've become more and more disgusted with Huffington Post over time. I used to fall for sensationalist headlines only to find that the article and headline DID NOT MATCH. It didn't take many visits to the site before I realized that dishonest headlines seemed to be a regular occurrence.

It's also a crying shame that people I know read and talk about HuffPo articles, which can lead to exaggerated opinions. While I may be a liberal and prefer reading liberal news sources, I find Huffington Post's dishonest, skewed reporting distasteful.

As an aside, in re: Time Magazine, I used to read news magazines as a teenager in the mid-to-late 1990s, though mostly Newsweek. I felt a bit sophisticated to read the magazine while I was younger, but I was surprised at how childish the magazine seemed when I entered my teens. The magazine felt as though it had no sense of nuance or subtlety and most articles came off as blunt. Time seemed even lower (in terms of readability) than Newsweek.

Though, by that time, I moved on to reading the Economist on a regular basis. However, even now, I don't care much for reading the Economist any longer. Their positions come off as predetermined and the text is merely a rationalization of oft-times unpalatable political positions. Then again, it seems that most news agencies are keen to write about unpalatable political positions.

Now I need some gum. The above has put a bad taste in my mouth...

[Brian Fies]

Wait, what are the five foods I should never eat? I need to know because I think there's a good chance I ate one of them yesterday.

I'm with you 100% Mike, but we've already lost. "Accurate impartial news is important" is one of those propositions like "privacy is precious" or "don't steal something someone else created and call it a favor" where I feel as out of step with the times as if I'd wandered in from the Colonial Era. Too many people don't even comprehend the objection. Sometimes this century befuddles me.

I wonder if the idiocy on display in Internet comments was always there but invisible, or if the Internet itself somehow creates it. I think both. There's got to be some satisfaction in being a troll, getting a rise out of people. Finally having a podium from which to shout that stupid thing you've always thought but never had the guts to say aloud. It shakes my faith in this Great Experiment of ours to read these morons and, in my head, append Scott Adams' coda, "...and then he voted."

I also remind myself that most of the people I know, and particularly the young people I know, are as smart and ethical as any ever. It's a very small sample with severe selection bias, but still encouraging.

[Bob]

Brian,

I regularly have to remind myself that the ignorance I see in internet comments also is "a very small sample with severe selection bias."

So... oh, sorry - I've become unstuck again. Montana's calling me.

Billy Pilgrim

[Sherwood Harrington]

Just after reading this, I watched a video that one of my colleagues had linked to over on Facebook. It is a gorgeous, 20-minute set of images of Earth as seen from space, narrated for the most part by astronauts trying to explain the transporting experience of seeing our world from outside it. Upworthy headlines it... well, see for yourself: http://www.upworthy.com/some-strange-things-are-happening-to-astronauts-returning-to-earth?c=ufb1

(By the way, the scene of the Moldavian massacre is one of my favorites -- no, really, I mean the literal scene where it took place: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sherwoodh/6930354059/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/sherwoodh/6784276744/in/photostream/ ).

[Robert H Cunningham]

"Truth is mighty and will prevail.There is nothing wrong with this except it ain't so."-Mark Twain
Times may change,technology may change,people don't.

[Mary in Ohio]

Wasn't it Twain who also said "A lie will be halfway sround the world before the truth can get its boots on."?

[Sherwood Harrington]

It's interesting that the last two quotes about truth are from someone who didn't publish under his own name.

[Mike Peterson]

I've become very annoyed with people who make the point that the Second Amendment was written in the days of the muzzle-loader without also noting that both it and the First Amendment were written with a dip pen.

But, while it wouldn't make me repudiate the First Amendment, I would suggest that the Internet is to the spreading of lies as the banana clip is to the spraying of bullets.

There have always been liars and there have always been gunmen. But never have they been so efficient in their destruction as they are today.