Clickbait isn’t journalism — and outrage influencers are tearing us apart | Opinion

Somewhere along the way, journalism stopped being about informing people and started being about engagement. And that shift — from truth to traffic — has quietly become one of the biggest reasons people don’t trust the media anymore.

The modern news cycle runs on clicks, not credibility. The louder, angrier or more outrageous something sounds, the more people click on it. That’s not journalism — that’s bait. And it’s tearing at the seams of our ability to talk to each other like human beings.

We need to bring ethics and humanity back into journalism. That means rewarding accuracy over outrage, honesty over engagement. It means supporting local newsrooms — such as The Kansas City Star, KCUR, The Kansas Reflector, The Missouri Independent, The Beacon, The Call and Dos Mundos — that are still doing the work the right way: telling the truth, even when it’s not flashy or viral.

When every post, headline or video is judged by how much interaction it gets — not by how true or relevant it is — it changes everything. Controversy sells. Outrage spreads faster than facts. It’s easier to be a contrarian than it is to be careful, and it’s far more profitable.

We’ve built an online world where saying something reasonable gets ignored, but saying something inflammatory gets rewarded. Algorithms don’t care if what you post is true — they care if people engage. And what gets engagement? Anger. Fear. Division.

The more we click on dramatic headlines, the more the system feeds us dramatic headlines. It’s a feedback loop that leaves us suspicious, defensive and divided. We don’t take statements at face value anymore. We assume bad intent. We read between the lines, searching for hidden meanings or agendas that often aren’t there. And when every outlet seems to be pushing a narrative instead of reporting facts, trust evaporates.

It’s not just hurting readers — it’s hurting journalists, too. Many of them entered this field to tell real stories and give people reliable information. But now they’re forced to compete with influencers, outrage merchants and artificial intelligence-generated noise for attention. Editors demand catchy, shocking headlines because otherwise nobody clicks. Even good writers get trapped in a system that values virality over integrity.

And the result? We’ve lost faith in the very people trying to keep us informed.

This culture doesn’t just encourage misinformation — it encourages bad behavior. People now post things online knowing they’ll cause an argument. Conflict equals comments, and comments equal visibility. It’s the social media economy in its purest, ugliest form.

But not every hill needs to be fought on. Not every opinion needs a counterpunch. It’s OK to scroll past something and move on with your day. We don’t have to fight every battle the algorithm throws at us.

If we keep equating attention with value, journalism as we know it won’t survive. The public will stop believing anything they read — not because they’ve become cynical, but because they’ve been conditioned to expect manipulation. Once trust is gone, it’s almost impossible to rebuild.

It’s time to stop letting clicks dictate truth. Because if journalism becomes just another form of entertainment, we all lose.

Until we start valuing substance over spectacle, we’ll keep drifting further apart — one clickbait headline at a time.

Jessica Deterding is a family-focused Kansas City native with roots in the community spanning five generations. She works as a manager at a local hotel and is the owner of her own small business.