pb501515@ohio.edu
In a digital world so saturated with fake news stories comes an outlet that ramped up the spread of nonfactual information to 11. I am, of course, talking about Clickhole. This satirical news outlet has been providing entertainment and social commentary for years. In today's blog post I will be talking about how I talking about their impact on the media landscape as a whole.
I will be straight up here. I LOVE Clickhole.com. I think their satirical take of clickbait news is the best out there. They may have started out as a second page attached to The Onion but I feel they have grown to be an unique satirical entity worthy to stand besides them.
For those of you that do not know what Clickhole does, allow me to shed some glorious light. To me, Clickhole is a purposeful fake news outlet solely consists of attention-grabbing headlines that lead to nothing but jokes. It is essentially a satirical critique on outlets like Buzzfeed and how it is ridiculous to base our news consumption on whichever outlet makes a more interesting or entertaining headline. Some have found the effectively attention-grabbing antics to be nothing more than a mere quick joke destination. While I completely agree I feel it says so much about how far our society has come when it pertains to the spread of information. It is obviously misleading to mainly focus on the headlines rather than the content but once they get the click then their point has been proven. I find this to be truly genius.
Whether its for the good or the bad, Clickhole stays so simplistic in its approach to critiquing Buzzfeed and the tabloids because that is where we are as media consumers. They realized that some of the most successful websites are releasing surveys like "which Disney character are you?" and are getting immense crowd reaction and clicks solely based in nostalgia and curiosity. To me, this is ridiculous and Clickhole embraces those things in stride.
Its just a joke what's the harm?
Allow me try to play devil's advocate for a second, and see how an abundance of purposefully fake news for the sake of laughter is not always a great thing. For starters, there are still people who mistake stories found on The Onion or Clickhole to be breaking news. To these people's credit, when a media outlet's entire platform is based on hyperbolizing and satirizing the formulaic conventions of breaking news culture, it's safe to say they make it look like the real thing. Luckily the onion has established it's self well enough a satirical news outlet that this doesn't happen as much as it did when they first started but they have always had incredibly biting social commentary with headlines like "'No way to prevent this,' says the one nation where it happens regularly" that harshly and accurately critiques America's gun laws. With this example all I am trying to say is that people do take what they say with a grain of salt but when the intentionally fake comes close to unintentional and effective journalism the line of what are considered credible sources can be blurred, I personally think satire is that important that it can blur lines if it gets the message across but I do see how these kinds of outlets don't really help with the end of fake news. But at the end of the day if you believe a joke as fact, then the joke wins.
Picture courtesy of Clickhole.
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