Remember that game called telephone that you played as a kid in which someone whispers a phrase or sentence into your ear and you in turn repeat what you heard to the person after you? The more people you played it with, the more likely the wording changed drastically by the end. If it was ever explained, it's an exercise in demonstrating how facts get skewed. But did you ever play that game with an asshole who purposely distorted the wording so that at the end when the last person yelled the phrase and the group tried to figure out where it went wrong he (it was always a he; girls were never that immature) would gleefully yell or smugly confide in one student that he did it? That's what Internet reporting is like.
The more traffic a site gets, the more it can charge advertisers more money since that translates into a greater likelihood of people clicking their links. Naturally then Internet reporting (and plenty television and radio "news" as well for the same reason) would seek to sensationalize as much as possible to maximize traffic reducible to ad revenue. Essentially, if the syllogism is sound, Internet reporters are assholes.
But they're actually far worse than that. They're propagators of propaganda without an actual subversive agenda. They just do what they do because they hope it will have the desired effect which in turn will earn them a shoddy income. But there's an epiphenomenon as well that goes unconsidered and if realized becomes ignored just like pouring toxins into rivers. And that is the spread of misinformation causing a grossly misinformed public.
There are of course other factors. Marketing and PR certainly do their share, as well as the agendas of institutionally-backed studies and political rhetoric, but these are to be expected. Each seeks to further its employer's interests, so why should the news be any different? The sad answer is that these journalists don't report the news so much as twist it to make it more sensational and thereby more interesting. Their reporting is a travesty of journalism so far as it compromises the integrity of actually covering a story in favor of maximizing viewership. The story still gets conveyed, but it's filtered through the lens of sensationalism.
On one hand I can't fault the news-entertainment industry for creating such a niche, though it should be pointed out that less baseless news sources such as NY Times, CNN, and BCC rank among the top news providers. But on the other hand, when I consider how the proliferation of utter falsities and misinformation has contributed both to infecting a largely gullible population and making the unadulterated truth harder to discover, I lament what the implications it has for our culture. People are more informed today than ever before, but they are largely misinformed and therefore dumber (although one could argue that being dumb increases the likelihood of being misinformed, the causality is probably dialectical).
The satirical, dystopic movie Idiocracy was scary to me because its projected future reality didn't seem too far off. I could guess at the missing pieces in the causal chain that could lead us from our current society to one in which idiots abound and the policies reflect the values of the people. And while it's a bit of a stretch to say that the relatively recent trend in misleading journalism is indicative of greater societal degeneration, I wouldn't rule it out as a non-factor.
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