Sunday, October 22, 2017

Keep an eye out for over-hyped news stories.

As you are probably aware there is a new kind of problem we have all been experiencing lately. Though we are all aware of fake news, I think there is a new issue rising. I'm talking about the over-hyped news story. Instead of a totally false story like fake news, these are stories that are built up to be earth shattering expose that will totally change everything forever! And then the story is released. Most of the time something really happens but it's not nearly as big as it is hyped to be.

It's very obvious why this kind of thing happens. Journalists want to build up hype so people actually read the story when it comes out. They also tend to believe their own exaggerations and greatly overestimate how much impact any kind of story that they have.

We need to keep any eye out for these stories and realize that oftentimes when people promise the moon they don't have much. Sometimes those stories are actually very important but when people are expecting earth-shattering they get disappointed with just a huge story.

I think some of this is just people expecting too much. For example there was the recent Uranium One story. It's a major news story that accuses Hillary Clinton of serious wrong doing and also implicates other members of the Obama administration of wrongdoing. But people are disappointed with that? Why? I guess they wanted something so powerful that no one would ever want to be a Democrat again. What that could be I don't know since I think people would still support Clinton even if she was caught on camera sacrificing babies to Moloch, but the point remains. If you want the one thing that ends Democrats forever (or Republicans for that matter), you are probably going to be disappointed.

So what are some signs of an over-hyped news story? People saying things like "tick tock" tends to be a huge red flag. People saying that their story is a "gamechanger" or that it will change everything is also a very bad sign. Generally, you shouldn't trust anything that is telling you what you want to hear.

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