Sensationalized Travel News. Anyone else getting tired of this sort of thing?

Very much so! Two friends cx a trip we were to take because of an announcement by mainstream media from the State Department. Having an issue in NYC doesn’t mean you don’t visit Albany, as an example. Our trip was international. They no longer travel with me because I no longer ask them.

Sensationalism has always been a part of journalism. This is especially true with headlines as they are there to grab your arrention and get you to read the article.

Think about it, which headline is going to grab your attention..."Airline Grounds Planes with worldwide fuel shortage" or "KLM keeps 99% of its flights.".

Unfortunately, it's not really sensationalism that gets you but the newer practice of "cllickbait."

Look at it this way...how many threads were started on this forum in the last few days about the possible fuel shortage?

FrankII, okay, I guess I need to find a new name for misrepresenting reality to sell news without care for the social and personal and emotional harm it may cause.

If you are constantly seeing sensational news and click bait headlines it’s more to do with the websites you are accessing and the links you are clicking than the news itself.
The ‘algorithms’ feed you what they think you want to see so you will keep clicking and the companies will make revenue.

The point of a headline is to encourage you to read the article so they are never going to be dull. Rubbish will always get through but if you stick to more reputable sites, don’t randomly click on links on Facebook and avoid Twitter totally you will see a lot less of it.

The only place I come across these types of clickbait “news” articles is here on this forum where there reposted, sometimes in an equally clickbaity fashion. And yes, I’m very tired of them.

My neighbor dropped out of the university journalism program because of the class on leading/deceiving people. And yes, it gets old. I mostly check local news and am cutting back on that as well.

"The only place I come across these types of clickbait “news” articles
is here on this forum where there reposted, sometimes in an equally
clickbaity fashion. And yes, I’m very tired of them."

Yes. We can all become more selective about what we chose to post. Amplifying nonsense is not productive.

Yes, I am tired of them too. And no, I never take the clickbait.

In the olden days it was called "Yellow Journalism" designed to get you buy a newspaper. Now it is clickbait designed to get you to click on the site so we can imbed some cookies into your cookies into your system for multiple reasons.

In defence of this forum and its contributors, I find that very little clickbait gets posted here. Generally if people are posting news items it tends to be from fairly trusted sources. I have a degree of trust in what I read in The Guardian, a centre-left source admittedly, which may not be to everyone's taste, BBC News is fairly neutral and the wire services like Reuters and AP can be useful. A degree of "reading between the lines" is necessary anywhere you're consuming news media.

I can't think of a single instance off the top of my head where someone has posted anything absolutely bonkers here recently. The signal-to-noise ratio here is really good compared with other places on the internet in my opinion.

I got fed up with nonsense posted on Facebook during Covid, binned my account and haven't gone back. Facebook and X are probably the worst places to get a balanced view of the world. It's really easy to get caught in an echo chamber that reinforces your existing prejudices on both those places. I don't post on Reddit much these days, but if you have basic critical thinking skills I think that's a good place to get a feel for what other people think. I think the purely text-based nature attracts people who are happier expressing themselves just in words rather than memes and AI slop.

Headlines once included a small measure of the "who-what-when-why-how-where", but that was when journalism cared about transparency and honesty.

My fear, when it comes to trashy headlines, is not only that travelers might heed them, but that our State Department bureaucrats might depend on these same headlines - and on the trash details in the articles as well - to issue their travel advisories and warnings. It would not be the first time that our government officials have paraded fiction as fact.

GerryM, I have to agree with you. Well to tge point that what gets posted on the forum isn't stupid-bonkers. I dont consider what i posted above as bonkers, just misleading to grab attention. Without going into the right vs left discussion there does seem to be more sensationalism than in the past. But maybe I am wrong.

Gerry, I’m not talking about news articles from The Guardian, BBC News, Reuters, AP and I don’t think Mr. E was either. I mean articles from other sources that are posted here, sometimes even without any introduction.

Since the invention of the printing press there has been good journalism and sensationalist rubbish published side by side.

As an example I recently watched a drama documentary ‘Jack the Ripper : Written in Blood’ which tells the story of how The Star newspaper sensationalised the story of the murders to boost circulation. A journalist actually faked the famous Jack the Ripper letters that gave the murderer his name, amongst many other dodgy practises.

Sensation sells ( or today gets likes and reposts). I suppose the difference is when it was print press you had to actually buy the paper and might wave a headline at a friend saying ‘ have you seen this’. You didn’t share the paper with all your friends. Also if you read a paper you weren’t then spammed with hundreds of similar papers telling similar stories.

there does seem to be more sensationalism than in the past.

I think that's probably true to a degree. The media landscape has transformed in comparison to how it was when we were younger, no doubt. It's impossible for a newspaper to turn a profit from advertising and sales in the same way it was thirty or forty years ago. I always try to catch myself when I get caught up in nostalgia for how it was "better in the old days" in regard to anything though. Things change. The amount of material out there to read and watch is exponentially greater than it was back then. You just need to filter a bit more. The challenges media and news providers face when it comes to making money are a whole different ball game to what it used to be, and different tactics need to be deployed accordingly.

As far as Tirana goes, having "beach destination" in relation to it in the headline would be an immediate catch for me. I'd be squinting at anything said below that headline. I wouldn't necessarily completely dismiss it, but obvious inaccuracies like that are a dead give away, to me anyway. Albania's definitely up and coming as a resort destination for Europeans in general though, no doubt. Nobody on here, or Rick himself, is interested in European beach resorts though it seems. Quite a bit of snobbery around that from North American travellers.

Are you surprised GerryM ? We are regularly told on here that the UK has no decent beaches :-)

Nobody on here, or Rick himself, is interested in European beach
resorts though it seems. Quite a bit of snobbery around that from
North American travelers.

Might be because Americans have excellent beaches in the US and in Mexico and Central America, that don’t require such a long flight. But there are tons of stuff in Europe that Americans don’t have or don’t have as good quality in the Americas so that’s what they concentrate on when they go to Europe.

But some of us are here on extended holidays and the Albanian beaches make sense. I've been once and was working on plans for a possible return when the Albania warning nonsense popped up. I will be on a Montenegrin beach in June, also not terribly popular with Americans.

Might be because Americans have excellent beaches in the US and in Mexico and Central America, that don’t require such a long flight.

Yes, you're probably right. I'd still maintain that there's enough differences that make European resorts worthy of at least some consideration. There's elements of perceived class divisions and cultural differences that are a factor too though I think. A whole different debate for another time maybe :)

Hmmmmm. No idea.

Don't forget, it was William Randolph Hearst and the "yellow journalism" of his newspapers that got the US to start the Spanish-American War.

They knew a war would sell more newspapers.

I've also noticed that many "influencers" on social media will copy unfounded travel information that they see on one site and put it on their site to get people to watch. It's basically "high-tech yellow journalism."

Yes! I've been sick of Yellow Journalism for some time now. To help counteract that and bring some balance to the news I consume, I subscribe to Fix the News: https://fixthenews.com (Hope it's okay to share this here.)

From their "About" page:

'If it bleeds it leads' isn't just a mantra for tabloid editors
anymore. It's a fundamental commercial reality for the media industry.
A recent study of 23 million headlines from 47 popular news outlets
showed that in the last two decades the share of headlines denoting
anger increased by 104% and the share evoking fear surged by 150%.

It's not just your imagination. The news really has become more
negative. It's making us all feel grim about the present, and hopeless
about the future. Pessimism is so deeply ingrained in our media
culture that it’s become the default frame imposed on all our
realities. It’s not breaking news anymore. It’s broken news.

Rosado, Hughes and Somerset (2022) What if we could fix it?

This newsletter was founded on the simple idea that another form of
journalism is possible. For the past nine years, we’ve made the case
that the news can delight and inspire, and our tens of thousands of
readers are evidence that there’s a genuine market for this kind of
content.

There is a lot of good news out there, we just don’t hear about it.
Not feel-good stories about pets and barbershops, but real, big
picture stories, about public health victories, rising living
standards, human rights wins, conservation, clean energy, and
scientific breakthroughs. Most mainstream news outlets miss this
stuff. Partially because stories about disaster and division get more
eyeballs, but also because the nature of progress is slow. It happens
over longer time periods - and this doesn't fit the modern media's
fast-paced, 24 hour reporting style.

Our goal isn't to be a comprehensive news source, but to play our part
in mending the wider media ecosystem by being deliberately unbalanced.
There are thousands of media organisations that excel at telling you
about everything that's going wrong in the world. We're one of the
very few that tell you what's going right.

I get tired of the lack of basic spelling, punctuation and grammar.

"What's that up in the road, a head?"

I especially get tired of mis-quotes or incomplete quotes.

"90% of travelers in X-place get assaulted!"

Entire quote, "90% of travelers in X-place get assaulted IF they hang out in the bar district in the sleazy part of an unfamiliar town, late at night, alone, while intoxicated."

And there are plenty examples of conditional (if / then) statements in the news lately that have nothing to do with travel.

I have to admit i'd never heard of yellow journalism before now, so consider myself educated.

It seems like a particularly American idea. I've never bought into the idea of a completely neutral press that is, or was, so espoused in the US. As soon as you put pen to paper there's going to be an element of bias, either in what you say, or choose not to say. Anyone who grew up in the UK with the tabloid press is used to that sort of thing, for better or worse. Straight reporting of facts has its place of course, but can be extremely dull and very hard to engage an audience with.

Bias in the media is like water off a duck's back for me. We used to get the Daily Record delivered when I was wee. I decided I'd rather read The Guardian at about age 12 or 13 because I preferred a more left-leaning newspaper. A Guardian, an NME and a Melody Maker (music weeklies) was my ritual on a Thursday. If you know what you're reading, bias can be OK I think.

Familiarity with your reading material is key. As long as the bias is honest and up front, there's no problem. A good, clear editorial stance is nothing to be afraid of, in my opinion. The problem lies where untruths and inaccuracies are presented as fact. I can see where elements of that may come in when people get their news from a myriad of disparate sources of unknown quality, as is often the case in the modern online space.

Like Diane, I have friends who canceled travel due to fear generated by sensational headlines. They were unwilling or unable to rationally analyze the situation. Also like Diane, these friends are no longer included in our travels. While it’s easy to blame the media, the real problem is that some people fail to use any common sense and instead react emotionally to clickbait.

I think this is hilarious.

In a sick kind of way.

This forum has a high signal to noise content with only occasional wackadoodle posts/links.

And that's brought up with dismay at the same time Major networks in this Country have been doing this for decades. Producing much (not all) of the current mess.

Hilarious

Simpgolf, there has been so much you dont know what to believe. Thats why I remain numb to subjects like jet fuel shortages. Who knows how much is balanced and how much is alarmist to sell clicks. I'll know the truth when it happens, what ever it is. Remember the Barcrlona water guns. One guy got his picture taken and he became the evidence of a movement. Of course people react and stay home.

Fortunately I think this forum is fairly accurate and balanced. The prolem.I see I that people here and everywhere read and believe most of everything they see or hear. It only takes a few minutes to do further research to verify or disprove anything. I have a goid friend who truly believes everything she reads on the internet without fail. she once canceled a trip by train due to a derailment. Without any research she had no idea it had happened several years prior. So sad to live like that.

And Gail you are correct. I maybe could have worded it better but the question was no reflection on the forum. More on the resources we use to support our hobby. The topic morphed a bit from the frustration piece to the issue of the news impacting plans. Thats good.

A short interlude.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2uTFF_3MaA

Regards Ron

I saw a good one yesterday. Something like "Most Disappointing Cities in Europe for Tourists." And the list was Rome, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, Berlin, London, Venice, Florence, and on and on.

And then there's the ubiquitous "Most Dangerous Cities in Europe for Tourists." Of course it's a slide show, and for every city they listed the danger was... pickpockets. Not assaulted by gangs, or shot at random, or kidnapped for ransom. Just pickpockets.

I wonder how the anti-tourist action in Barcelona and other parts of Spain will be reported this year? Some outlets covered it in quite a sensationalist way last year. It's a tricky one. I can see how a lot of folk could be quite passionate about it, but you don't want to blow it out of proportion. It's just really coming into the start of the season in Spain now, but I haven't heard anything so far.

As a Catalan aside which may interest some, on the subject of just coming into the start of the season in Spain, I was watching a video from a creator, Dwayne Muffin, a down to earth Irishman living in Ibiza. I just watched a good little video of his the other day. He's seems like a nice guy and has some interesting vlogs just out and about in Ibiza, as well as covering some of the club scene. I'll link to his recent video below, but it's worth scrolling back through the rest of his channel if Ibiza interests you.

https://youtu.be/18xGADbJthc?si=-vg2FDyO7iaMmQek

.

Benjamin Franklin knew how to sensationalize a headline to get results.

This is my best Jack Nicholson impression (in writing).

You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world where people don't want facts they want opinion. They want to read opinions that match up with their opinions. People want to read false statements about their political rivals. Journalists today live by a code which says we should exaggerate, misdirect or flat out lie. We follow this code to strengthen our media position. You cannot fathom how difficult it is to be a journalist today, but who is going to do it, you Mr. E? We don't care what truth you want. You either take what we give you or I suggest you start your own media outlet.

Are all journaiists liars?

You dam right we are!!! 😂😂

The Rick Steves' Europe Group on FaceBook has gotten soooo out of hand. At least five times a day someone posts about cancelling their upcoming travel because they are worried that their flights will be cancelled due to fuel shortages. Some of them are worried about their trips that are planned for November, and are asking the FB group to help them decide if they should cancel now.

The other post that comes up five times a day is people asking the same questions about visas, EES, ETIAS, and what kind of medications they can take to xxxxx country. They can't seem to read the previous answers and it seems that none of them know how to search for the official websites giving them factual information rather than what a bunch of strangers on FB are telling them.

And then people get upset when, instead of telling them what your personal opinion is, you tell them to Google for information. I get called rude all the time for trying to explain to people how they can do their own research.

naalehuretiree, yes its all a bigger view of sensationalizing everything. Of course to be fair, I am often seen as part of tge problem because I think all the information should br shared. I am just now understanding that a large part of society can not put information in perspective and deal with it rationally.

I get called rude all the time for trying to explain to people how they can do their own research.

Not rude at all. People should learn to do their own research and then come here to sharpen up the details of their trip. What is that old saying?

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life.”

I simply refuse to engage in histrionics and hyperbole. Thanks to Grandpa for that character trait.

If I want Chicken Little I watch the news.

One thing I've learned over the years is catastrophic thinking is a waste of time and energy. What I worry about rarely happens and it's just not worth it.

Sadly, I think it is here to stay and is across most media formats.

I generally stick to two sources for news - directly from the source newspapers or other "reputable" sites (like WSJ, WaPo, NYT, or similar where I often have subscriptions - and then my general "Apple News" feed which is drawing from a lot more broad groupings. The Apple (and Google News) feed is where the "headline grabber" stuff sometimes lurks. I can, over time, remove the more outrageous sources, as those are also the ones that rarely post new news :-) but rather post stale or sensationalized news with a crazy headline.

My "Top Stories" at this moment on Apple News:
- NPR: "US negotiators prepare for more peace talks as Trump repeats threats to Iran"
- Politico: "In wake of political violence, states use campaign cash for personal security"
- Christian Science Monitor: "In Sudan's mountains, wartime orphans are raised to be peacemakers"
- Inside Climate News: "At "sloth world" in Florida, wild sloths have died by the dozens"
- The Economist: "From Ralph Lauren to The Row, American luxury is booming"
- Scientific American: "What's this fast-moving wave of darkness creeping across Mars?"

None seem too sensational, but a few are a bit on the line. "By the dozens" and "booming" are tough without some context around time lines or relative to other variables.

What I dislike most is a trend in Youtube or other video streaming, where content creators are almost "forced" to create an outrageous title and/or title slide. Some negative-ish title plus an angry photo or other angry looking stuff. That's often in my "home" feed with users I don't follow but who are being recommended via the suggestion algorithms. Annoying :-(

AI thumbnails, even from good creators, are a scourge of YouTube now. It's fair enough that something trashy that you might not watch anyway has an AI thumbnail, but when a good video with serious non-AI content also uses one, it gets my goat. It annoys me how much creators now fall back on that for clicks, especially this past year or two.

Tom R. Those pass my smell test. Except I didn't know FL had sloths? I think you have the right idea.

I'm kinda surprised at The Economist's headline actually. You'd wonder how that could be true at the moment. I think that preppy look might be on the up with Gen Z. See, it's got me interested in the article with a snappy headline.

I was a subscriber to The Economist for years. I always enjoyed their take on things. It's not unbiased, more just balanced, but it's not generally sensationalist. I don't subscribe to the paper now and most of their good stuff is hidden behind paywalls online.

Mr. E is one of my favorite posters on this forum.

Yes, there is loads of news out there, from many sources. There is always FEAR posted because some sources are likely trying to get people's attention.

I think touring is still a viable thing, but yes, sometimes travel can be upset.
Typical upsets:
1) Volcanic eruption in Iceland that affected transatlantic air travel for months;
2) The advent of COVID-19 spreading:
3) The bombing of Iran that started around March 1. (We had just flown from Nepal on a tour to Dubai and our flight to the USA was just four days prior to the bombing). We were some of the lucky ones.

One thing that I see a lot is many posters concerned about visiting key European sites or cities because of the crowds. Yes, I started traveling overseas in the early 1980s when the crowds were way less than today. Still, we still visit major cities despite the crowds. It just takes good planning and booking either a group tour that handles bookings, transport, lodgings, etc. or you plan and research well and book your necessaries in advance.

It is amazing to me that people would NOT visit a place like Rome and see the Sistine Chapel, Coliseum, Forum, etc. because of crowds.

geovagriffith, you may have destroyed your reputation with that first comment.

You are correct about Rome. If you didn't see it before 70AD you missed Rome before it became over touristed. It hasn't been the same since Titus attracted so much attention to it after the sacking of the temple. Even RS has been saying to look for secondary cities since then, like Constantinopolis.

I think Mr É is romanticizing things a bit. All those plebeians standing around, sketching the sights with their styli and tablets were so annoying! And it was so difficult to fold all that toga fabric to fit in a carryon loculus!

HAR HAR,
Yes, Emperor Titus was the one that inaugurated the opening of the Coliseum, that his Father Vespasian had built. The Coliseum was built between 72 and 80AD.

The point, most things are relative.

And some things are not (Dead is dead). Both vacuous statements.

This is not "Yellow Journalism". That was limited by having to go through newspapers. This is not even what the TV Stations/Networks did to the Country for the last decades. That had its limits as well. Though they did train a Generation (or more) that this stuff works.

Google "Post Truth Society" sometime. Or don't bother.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics

Now, anybody can reach out to the whole Planet. At least the parts that still let the Internet in.

We will reap what we've sown, and the crop won't be pretty. :(

Except I didn't know FL had sloths?

@Mr E - you forced me to click on the story, and it is about a Florida road-side attraction planning to open Sloth World, and they fly in sloths from their natural habitats south of the border. Apparently, they don't travel well (too much stress to notoriously low stress animals) and the new site has not completed the sloth habitat yet, so their "temporary" home is - seemingly - less than optimal and has resulted in 31 dead sloths :-( and a few visits from the Florida authorities.

@gerrym - yep...seems preppy is "in" and the various US brands have also worked hard at repositioning, marketing, and some tweaks to their pricing & line-ups. It helps that the US remains on better footing than most of the world (all of the world?) WRT to the economy, so we can spend more and often choose the familiar US stuff.

My latest line-up:
AP News: “Doubts over talks between Iran and US after violence flares in Strait of Hormuz”
USA Today: “Shreveport looks for answers about gunman who killed 8 children: Updates”
NPR: “This tariff-refund portal is about to be America's hottest website”
Fox Weather: “Massive magnitude 7.4 earthquake rattles northern Japan as threat downgraded to Tsunami Advisory for coast”
** WSJ: "Florida’s Population Boom Fizzles as High Costs Drive Away Middle Class"
** National Geographic: "Why cannabis may make you remember things that never happened"
WaPo: “Amazon is behind on jobs promised for funding to build Virginia headquarters”

I starred ** the two articles that would be a little sensational, and I think the NPR one is a bit of a (actually a huge) stretch.

I will say, I've only read the WSJ story, and it was pretty "thin" on much concrete info, but does set the stage for more in-depth reporting down the line if the early trends continue (or are just a blip).

Possibly the sloths stressed out over the jet fuel issue.

Those are all pretty normal headlines. Nothing too rabid about them.

While I truly believe in the concept of having a free press, I've said, for at least 15 years, that many in the media don't report the news so much as they create the news. Since the advent of 24/7/365 news programming, they simply have to have something to fill up the time and space. And as the old saying goes, "sexy sells".