During the last couple of months I’ve noticed a trend in the tornado of political anger. Years ago when written news was brought to us through newspapers, we read headlines followed by the article beneath it. A headline could be surprising or shocking and not be detrimental because the surprise made us read the news.
Now, social media allows people to just read the headline and respond by reposting the headline and include a comment about it and yet never actually reading the article. The article is right there anxiously waiting for someone to read it but everyone is too lazy or too busy to actually do just that.
Headlines like “Five People Shot During Protests” with a comment from the news department simply saying the same thing as the headline with a little twist like “People shot during protests!”. Same message but if you go to the article and read down to the 5th paragraph you find out that it had nothing to do with the protest. The people shot were nowhere near the protest and the man shooting them just felt like shooting a bunch of people.
Headlines like Trump says he will immediately deport or jail up to 3 million undocumented immigrants… with a comment that simply says Trump says he’ll immediately deport or jail up to 3M immigrants in U.S. illegally. Funny how they won’t say illegal aliens… you are not an immigrant if you are in a country illegally.
What does headline that tell you? People read that and think that he’s going to deport 3 million people. Nothing more. Unless you read the article where it tells you (2 paragraphs down) that he was talking about those that are criminals and here illegally. That’s it. Now whether or not a person thinks that is right or wrong is a different subject but it’s obvious that the media’s intention was to anger people, which they did. People reposted it with angry statements of “See… he’s sending innocent people packing”.
Criminals are not innocent!
People, please read the articles and do your research before you repost things. Opinions, maybe not so much, but when you post something as fact you damn well better know it’s actually fact.
It’s embarrassing when you need to go back and say “oops, I overreacted and didn’t do my research before pushing this forward”. Believe me!
This post was originally seen on Alexandria (aleksandreia.com).
