HOT TAKE: Modern news is just made up of hot takes
Hannah Krusty
Staff Writer
A SATIRE PIECE
Reporters on Twitter are the absolute worst about this. Like, “hey, wanna write a poorly researched and trash article about a topic I have no expertise in just to beat everyone to the punch and pump out controversy?” Smack on, like, 75 characters of flaming garbage used to fuel a dumpster fire comment section. Preferably, make it a quote taken completely out of context. Boy, howdy, you’ve just sent a monster off into the world.
Sit back while people scream “FAKE NEWS! …Sad!” or people with actual credentials chime in with a well-articulated argument that the aforementioned people respond by saying “FAKE NEWS! …Sad!” Laugh maniacally as you watch baby boomers and millennials/gen z-rs duke it out, internet style. Grin and twiddle your thumbs as you single-handedly ruin a career five minutes after your source tips you off with something “good” and all the 16-year-olds retweet with a single “#CANCELLED.”
Hedonistically revel as you, the catalyst of this mess and the entirely worst person to call yourself part of the media, watch the internet devolve (which is pretty par for the course, hot take).
Or hop on Facebook and watch random people laugh react at literally everyone in the comment section of a controversial or sad story. Laugh react at “thoughts and prayers.” Laugh react at the person who replied to that only to say “your thoughts and prayers can’t help them, Deborah.”
So you just had to make a story about something t h i s juicy, huh? You didn’t want to research it, or conveniently left out crucial information to get that god-awful hOt tAkE? Because who cares about a well thought out and nuanced article, yeah? No one, that’s who. It’s about that money, the clicks, the ad revenue.
This is why The Onion will always be the superior news channel. It’s well researched on current events– usually, they have a fresh take on situations that are spiralizing out of control on other platforms. When Reddit comments are best sorted by controversial because they want to clarify the facts of a hot take, fellas, we’re experiencing a major societal failure.
In conclusion, I really believe that the conversations surrounding current events have been killed. It’s only propagated by consumerism that’s expanded into the way we think and react to the world around us and what’s going on in it. Yellow journalism has been a thing for decades, but it’s only recently became so hard to distinguish between the narratives that are true and the ones that are false.
Oh, by the way, Spain sank the USS Maine.
HOT TAKE: this story hasn’t really been researched in any way, shape, or form. I’ve never used Twitter either.
Header photo courtesy of Flickr.