Teasers and Clickbait

TV news is a specialist in teasers. Such as: “Flood destroys the downtown of a major American city. Upcoming.”  Stay tuned and you’ll eventually learn that the basements of two buildings making up the main street in East Overshoe, Nebraska, got some water damage. But the real experts at teasers are online news sites, where they are called clickbait, which is a bit more polite than saying suckerbait. AOL News loves them. Here’s one on Nov. 11, 2016, “Donald Trump has called for a major federal agency to be eliminated — here’s how he  could do it.”  Click to the story and you learn it’s the Department of Education.  A cynic might say that the Department isn’t doing its job if Americans old enough to read are dumb enough to fall for such so-called journalism.