My theory is that paid per click advertising/clickbait is making it increasingly difficult to say anything that gets attention on the internet, so people increasingly use hyperbole. "Internet journalists" will trump things up to make it sound more exciting, feeding the hype machine. Those that don't succumb to the practice are just not heard. There are, of course, exceptions. But a well-reasoned, calmly stated argument from a nobody is never going to go viral in the way that an outlandish story from that same nobody could. i.e. Seth Godin doesn't have reach just because he's interesting, it's also because he's been working at it for over a decade, but any idiot can make up some fake story that goes viral and impacts the public consciousness.