Word Watch: Clickbait

‘UK Weather: When next heatwave could hit as Britain braces for torrential rain’ – headline, 14 July 2023

‘Huge swathe of the nation set for thunderstorms amid 27C hot spell’ – news headline, 8 July 2023

These headlines are typical of the supposed news items about the weather that flash up on my phone almost every day now. They vividly illustrate how the way we receive news alters the news itself. Are they reports of actual weather conditions? No, they’re speculations about how extreme conditions might occur. They are more concerned with exciting us with imaginary prospects than with informing us about known facts. They come under the general heading of what’s known as clickbait.

Ever since the Harmsworth brothers, with their splendidly Anglo-Saxon names, Alfred and Harold, invented journalism for the masses with the publication of the Daily Mail in 1896, the public have learned about current events in more or less sensational terms. (Not that sensationalism was new then: it has always been an important filter for information.) Since the arrival of the Internet the presentation of daily occurrences has been moulded to the twenty-first century dynamic of instant impact and ultra-rapid processing. 

It amuses me that this development has been applied not only to news but even to the weather. In the dear old days, meteorological forecasts came on the radio in an extremely sedate guise, with the (male, of course) announcer reciting details of cold fronts and depressions in as dead-pan a voice as the news items themselves. At some point in the seventies (I think it was) the BBC suddenly noticed that weather was not a subject requiring strict objectivity. It could be treated as light entertainment, with the announcer (now a ‘presenter’) sharing an emotional response to news of sunshine, heavy rain or snow. 

One of my lifetime heroes is the woman (I never found out her name but it should be immortal) who came on the BBC’s Feedback all those years ago to protest, a lone voice, about the inane wittering that replaced the straight delivery of meteorological facts. Irritating babble had become the norm, when we needed sober information. Her complaint, needless to say, fell on deaf ears, and we have endured increasingly chatty, waffly and jokey forecasts ever since (enhanced on television by frequently redesigned visuals). The ‘weather men’ (and women of course) are given free rein as entertainers in their own right and we’re patronised with tales of ‘the beast from the East’ or an ‘African plume’ – fantasies that make the weather forecast sound like the Arabian Nights.  As light entertainment is rarely the meteorologists’ strong suit, I find myself longing for the embarrassing act to be over: I would prefer a down-to-earth isobar.

Forgive the grumble. Back to the weather by way of clickbait. The word is new, having been invented very recently to describe the technique first used a century and a quarter ago by the pioneering Harmsworths now that it enters our lives by way of our smartphones rather than newspaper headlines. As a modern term it’s surprisingly honest, in that it makes no bones about what is happening: these news items are carefully designed, like an angler’s fly, to attract and trap the unwary browser surfing through the news. And, note, the items are always accompanied by a photograph whether a relevant one is available or not – another consequence of the new instant technology.

Quite often the photograph is irrelevant to the news item – taken from stock, in the hope that it will be vaguely appropriate, or not too glaring a misrepresentation. Wikipedia admits that clickbait headlines often include an element of dishonesty, using ‘enticements that do not accurately reflect the content being delivered.’ Indeed. But the language of the headline is often very funny, as my opening examples illustrate. In the second of them, ‘many people’ have become a ‘huge swathe of the nation’.  And if there’s no heat wave available, we will surely get ‘torrential rain’ – or the threat of it. Global warming or not, it seems we’re entitled to sensational weather every week. Sadly, nowadays, we do get it all too frequently. Does the way that news is reported actually affect the news itself? A subject for serious debate.  

By the way, it’s common now to encounter weather prospects that have been ‘forecasted’. The verb is ‘forecast’ in both active and passive moods, and ‘forecasted’ is yet another inexplicable twenty-first century invention.

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