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Comment by istorical | Hacker News Reader

Respect for journalism is as much about avoiding headlines like this that sneakily imply some sort of baseless causation via - in this case - the word "After" as it is about bad science in Fox News coverage of global warming.

When we let poor journalism like this headline go uncontested we erode public trust.

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Headlines are why I rarely read online news articles anymore, and typically just view the comment sections, either here on HN, or Slashdot, etc. It never used to be this bad. One would think that with public trust in the media at an all time low, they would make an effort to be less sneaky and clickbaity, at the very least with their headlines, but....... nope.

> public trust in the media at an all time low

Is that a fact or opinion? Likely they're seeing ad-revenue increasing with the clickbait titles, giving them a data-driven reason to pursue this (short-sighted) strategy. Long-term, they may lose their readership once they catch on.

Looks like it hit the absolute bottom in 2016 [0], with a slight uptick in 2017 according to some [1][2], but still, overall, according to various studies it's been at an all-time low during these last couple of years.

[0] http://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-medi...

[1] https://www.poynter.org/news/poynter-releases-new-study-exam...

[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/40503393/americans-are-more-trus...

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