Two things: First and second
Between disinformation and clickbaiting.
We were all allowed to experience it, provided we knew what these terms even meant. Because while young people consider every headline and every picture shown to them on the display of their hand-held device to be serious information, older people are of the opinion that the Bild newspaper alone invented it to take the capital letters as an incentive to buy.
Whereby it is fair to admit that short words are fundamentally undervalued; after all, it has been proven that prehistoric people only used monosyllabic grunts to communicate, why should we set ourselves apart from that? And we also know that it works better than ever today. If possible, thinking should not be done before the consumer to be milked has clicked and thus generated data and money.
But what is the reason for the meaningful headline? After all, the criticism of clickbaiting is that the promised information is not given in the further text.
There is a declaration of intent by the EU to have more influence in future on the way information is disseminated within its borders. That sounds fine, but what might be behind it?
We will never know
The EU, too, once wanted to enforce, when there were no media panic attacks yet, that advertising like bills in Germany fulfil the principle of clarity and truth.
We all know how well this works from the electricity bill we receive once a year and cannot understand a word without a law degree or a figure without a business administration dissertation.
For advertising, it should apply that only skin care products are advertised with 'bare skin' and that no impression should be created in the case of technical devices that would lie outside of their usefulness or usability.
What has been happening in Germany and presumably the world for more than a year and a half, we cannot say exactly, because the original ways of obtaining information have disappeared. Admittedly, there are still all the media, to be precise, they are becoming more and more and faster and faster, but what remains of them in the consciousness of the responsible citizens and citizens* (gender stars)?
A cabaret artist said at the end of March 2020, referring to the four-letter publication mentioned above: they don't want to inform - This is of course very one-sided. Maybe they want to inform, but only for money and with no guarantee that the paid information is fake or real. And the responsibility to interpret information and form an opinion is left to the consumer. The cabaret artist in question addresses this with regard to his person, that he can only gain a conviction from 1. the things he knows and 2. the things he thinks - and if the information is missing, the conviction grows solely from thoughts in his head.
The news disseminated and the questions that can and perhaps should be asked on the basis of it have - this is unfortunately completely unsatirical - regressed in the past year and a half as they have not done for almost 90 years. And before I come to a humorous conclusion, I would like to offer everyone to look at an interpretation-free website and, on the basis of the figures graphically presented there, answer questions such as:
1. what significance do percentages have if you don't know the absolute numbers?
2. what significance do absolute numbers have if you don't know the relations?
The reader may count that in this article the promise of the headline has indeed been fulfilled, but there is no promise that cannot be broken. When it is no longer possible to distinguish between serious and satirical news, the point has been reached that at least the USA thought it had overcome with Donald (the duck or the president).