Headlines and Freedom
A meditation on the free press in this click-bait era
Dead for showing a few locks of her hair.
What the calls to boycott ‘The Woman King’ are really saying.
In this strange world, where headlines sell despair
And clerics condone brutality through their praying
How are we to live?
The New Orleans police department is hiring civilians to help its officer shortage.
Move over, Bruce Willis: NASA is shoving an asteroid to test planetary defense.
If we are to live free, let us scrutinize such reportage
Inject discipline into stream-geyser cascades of sense.
Such word webs weave to catch their fly.
We can respect spider-craft and writers sly,
While warily wondering, questioning why
Which free words get placed before our eye.
None of these stories or opinions constitutes ‘click-bait.’ The world disseminating these stories and opinions, however, is driven by such practices.
When a cognition/reaction process operates so that every headline skips past our eyeballs seeking to drive that monetizable click response, we are prone to cynically (cautiously?) removing ourselves from everything — including things we should never distance ourselves from, if we even can remove ourselves from them despite, erm, Chicxulub or Armageddon or something.
(Yes, there’s a movie on the topic. No, the topic isn’t exhausted. But after a sentence like that previous paragraph, perhaps I am exhausted.)
