Indian Institute of Technology,

Roorkee

The Deceptive World of Media

Headlines

Dhruv Mehrotra
20122015
Batch: S5
Communication Skills adv.
Batch D
 Introduction
 Only 20% of the time, are news articles read beyond the headline, let alone fully.
 57% of news stories are shared without ever reading past the headline according to a Columbia University
study.
 Marketing companies plan separately to tackle this.
 To gain ad-revenue, all organizations need to get you to click on their content and hence sometimes publish
captivating but only partially true headlines

Problems:
1) Misleading/fake news (mostly manipulative content)
2) Clickbait-y- Headlines (portray something other than what the title suggests)
 Reasons for The Current Situation
 The sheer amount of information available.
 Increasing prominence of television and videos.
 47% Americans preferred to watch news, according to Pew Research Centre (2018).
 Visuals are extremely easy to edit to misrepresent and can appeal strongly to emotions while ignoring facts.
 Increase in incidence of people getting news from social media posts.
 All sources are given equal weight on social media, though at a significant cost. People share on social
media extremely casually, hence increasing chances of circulating information they don’t know a lot about.
 Lack of 21st century internet skills particularly in older, rural, and low-income groups.
The Sheer Extent.
 63% Americans surveyed by the News Literacy Project said they have a
hard time telling the real from the fake.
 58% of Americans said the increased amount of information to sift through
on social media makes it more difficult to stay informed.[according to the
News Literacy Project ]
 68% said they used social media to get news, 57% said they didn’t trust
what they read on those sites.[study by University of Michigan]
 Personally, we have all seen loud, outspoken debates and disputed
comments.
Real World Examples
 The Effects of This
 Threat to personal freedom and the nation.
 Reinforcing false beliefs. One reason why many people feel empowered
to share articles they haven’t read, aside from just not knowing that they
need to, is because the headline might proclaim something they already
believe.
 As a result of the large number of views and shares these fake articles
get, unreliable news sites start churning out more sensational headlines
and misleading stories to keep up the circulation.
 Unethical journalists with an agenda can tilt, dramatize, or falsify
headlines and information to audiences who won’t question them.
 Solutions
 It’s easy for reporters to blame consumers for their lack of news literacy. Since journalists are the ones with
media education, journalists should take the first step.
 Read less but read completely.
 Share opinions on social-media wisely.
 Read from trusted, unbiased sources that state facts and not opinions.
 Prefer crowd-funded/open-source newspapers that do not receive financial aid from big organizations.
 Spread the word. Perhaps the most important.
Thank You
Webliography :
https://horwardbusinessreview.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17512786.2019.1637768
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/its-very-deceptive-
world-full-of-lies/articleshow/66214952.cms
https://emilyrosethorne.medium.com/we-need-to-start-reading-past-the-headline-but-not-for-
the-reasons-you-think-fc64ec53f77b
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331619384_Headlines_as_Fake_News_2012-2018