When I was in college studying journalism I was the editor of the college newspaper for a semester. As lead editor, a lot of responsibility is put on a person even though this paper was free and only had a weekly circulation of around 10,000 units. If I, or any of the other editors that were in charge of this project that we were never paid for despite the fact that advertising was sold, for profit, had failed to catch ambiguous wording or had intentionally misleading headlines, we would have been reprimanded or perhaps "fired" from these positions we weren't even being paid for in the first place.
Of course this was before everything was online and the newspaper industry basically died so these days articles have to be churned out so fast that I guess a slip or two is possible. Unfortunately, the industry that was once treated as though truth in reporting was of the utmost importance has devolved to the point where deception is basically the name of the game.
One particular outlet that I get a great deal of amusement out of because of how basically identical all of their headlines are is Conservative Brief, which is basically the right-wing echo-chamber of selective statistics, never-ending polls that are almost certainly rigged to produced a desired result, and of course headlines that are barely, if at all related to information contained in the the article in question.
Before anyone gets upset and thinks that I am attacking conservatives understand this: I am attacking bad journalism and try to focus on all sides. I think both sides are extremely guilty of intentional manipulation of the truth.
src
CB produces about a half-dozen articles a day that they feature on their news aggregate and almost every single one of them will include the words "she's toast!" or "She is done" or something to that extent. To me in order to say that someone is "done" you better have some pretty incredible discovery to back that claim up but in this particular article there is merely a reference to updated phone call polls that include about 300 - 600 people. Now I don't know how much you know about statistics or polls - I know very little - but I think it is just common sense that if you randomly select 300 people out of a population that numbers in the millions, that from day-to-day the answers you receive are going to vary, wildly. In this instance they were referring to the people of Arizona, a state with a population of 7.5 million people. Attempting to state that 300-600 random people selected are somehow representative of something that is 25,000 times the size of the sample size is just madness. To take the result on one particular day and suggest that someone is somehow "done" because of a lucky day of getting the results that a conservative publication would like to see anyway is just bad journalism. It isn't journalism, it is propaganda.
src
Here's another one that any Harris-hating person would be delighted to see if the headline can be taken as truth... which of course it can't. In the 900 word article that simply addresses what almost everyone already knew - that the FBI crime statistics released for 2022-2023 were voluntary on the part of police offices and didn't include major metro areas - Harris' reaction to this information being finally released isn't even mentioned at all. So why so furious? We don't know if she was furious, she hasn't had a reaction to this at all and is probably going to avoid talking about it at all.
src
Here's another one that the headline is intentionally cut of where it is so that a potential reader has to click on it in order to see what Kamala has recently declared. There's just one problem with that though: In the article that the link leads to there is absolutely zero mention of anything that Kamala has declared that she will be doing, saying, contemplating, or eating. There is barely any mention of her at all and the only statement that is a quote from her was a reaction to the Bret Baier interview on Fox and she simply said "it was good." That's really the only "declaration" that she made and that's not a very good one is it.
Some thing that stood out in these horribly written articles that really stood out to me is this partial sentence: "A recent Gallup poll, for instance, found that 54 percent of Americans think Trump is better at managing the business than Harris (45 percent)." While I think that most people can probably formulate what might be being said here, what the hell kind of a sentence is that? "The business"? What business? All business? Do you mean the economy?
I looked into Conservative Brief as a company and discovered that they only have 3 employees or writers if you will, but apparently none of them are in the business of editing a coherent story. I have to hand it to them though, this tiny come-out-of-nowhere company has more engagement than the New York Times or the Washington Post and both of those companies are absolutely massive and employ thousands of people.
If the name of the game is deception, and I think that it is these days, Conservative Brief is doing a wonderful job of that. Their clickbait articles normally contain zero original information, have fabricated conclusions that cater to a demographic that loves catch-phrases and has a very low attention span. Unfortunately I think that a lot of people probably take this publication very seriously as well and honestly, that is one of the major problems with the news these days.
If you are a regular reader of Conservative Brief I strongly encourage you to branch out a bit because even though I tend to lean conservative in my own beliefs, I don't want my "news" to be all sunshine and rainbows while not actually informing me of anything at all. The right tends to point at the left and label all of them as being a "groupthink" bunch who are in an echo-chamber but if someone is getting their information from sites like Conservative Brief, they are doing exactly the same thing.
