Sanju and Media
The recent Hindi film Sanju has a lot of provocative things to say about media. The film is pretty watchable, and is wonderfully directed. But this is not a review of the film. This is about the things Sanju alleges about the media.
Betteridge’s law of headlines
A good part of the film revolves around the irresponsible use of titles by the media. A supposed news titled ‘RDX truck at Dutt house?’ causes friction between Sanjay Dutt & his best friend, and provokes Sunil Dutt to storm into a news editor’s office to deliver a sermon on media’s responsibility. If only Indian readers had been aware of Betteridge’s law of headlines.
Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist. As with similar “laws”, it is intended to be humorous rather than the literal truth.
(We are sure that Betteridge knew that his adage has obvious exceptions- in case the headline is one of journalists’ 5W1H (who / what / where / when / why / how)- think questions like ‘Who is Narendra Modi?’ or ‘How steam engine works?’.)
The age of click-baits
Betteridge style headline is but just one type of sensationalizing headlines, almost synonymous with click-baits these days due to digital media having taken over.
The entire thesis of click-baits is this: Digital media need clicks. One way to ensure that is to write high quality stories on news that matters. But that’s hard work. Enter BuzzFeed, UpWorthy, & their cousins.
Click-bait is not always a bad thing. What’s wrong with some creative way to engage your audience! (One might say that the title of this blog is also a click-bait! How meta!)
In-fact, there is such a thing as The CNN effect- a phenomenon in political science and media studies which states that CNN’s use of shocking images of humanitarian crisis’ around the world compels U.S. policy makers to intervene in humanitarian situations they may not otherwise have an interest in.
The real problem with clickbait is when clickbait manipulates readers. The reader is treated as a simpleton for whom the information is simplified in the most watered down version possible. This is problematic. Consider the following example:
The article might easily be misconstrued as air pollution being THE leading cause of cancer- which as the article itself mention- is categorically false! The article quotes a researcher saying:
Although air pollution increases the risk of developing lung cancer by a small amount, other things have a much bigger effect on our risk, particularly smoking.
As Einstein said, ‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler’.
At UnFound, this is among the core of what we want to solve. Stay tuned!
