Hugh Linehan: What can I do to trick you into reading this article?

When Piers Morgan was launching his flagship show for Rupert Murdoch’s new talkTV channel a fortnight ago, the marketing team pulled out all the stops. “Morgan vs Trump! The most explosive interview of the year!” yelled a trailer that appeared across every social media platform, showing the former president ripping off his mic and storming off the set after Morgan challenged his lies about the outcome of the 2020 election.

Trump’s team immediately complained that the clip misrepresented what had really happened over the course of the interview. In a surprising departure from precedent, they were actually telling the truth. When the full programme was broadcast, there were a couple of testy exchanges between interviewer and interviewee, but the overall encounter certainly didn’t live up to its explosive billing, and mostly consisted of the former president being coy about his plans for the 2024 race. There was nothing we hadn’t heard before.

What we saw was not an outraged walkout, just a typical display of the charmless petulance we all came to know so well during Trump's White House years

Most importantly, the official recording had concluded before Trump took his mic off. What we saw was not an outraged walkout, just a typical display of the charmless petulance we all came to know so well during Trump’s White House years.

Does it matter? Twenty five years of the commercialised internet have accustomed us to the many tricks-for-clicks deployed to entice us to view, sign up for or (the ultimate dream at the end of every digital “funnel”) spend actual money. The word “clickbait” has come into and gone out of fashion. Many of the most shameless tactics have been relegated to the margins. You’re unlikely these days to be assailed by pop-ups announcing you’ve just won a million dollars, or “news” stories suggesting you won’t believe what happened next.

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And yet, many of the same structural incentives still apply for publishers. The fact remains that one of the things that most distinguishes old-fashioned linear media (print, broadcast etc) from digital is that the former doesn’t need to hard-sell each individual article or programme quite as hard as the latter does. Despite the rise of subscriptions and paywalls, the jostle for online attention still retains some of the character of a particularly rowdy street market, with hawkers trying to out-shout their competitors. Not all the results are pretty.

The writer would able to return to their office clutching an attention-grabbing hook for their readers in the wretched, narcissistic hellhole they called home

Two examples. The first relates to the ever-present media disease of narrow provincialism. During my days as a film correspondent, I would sometimes attend group interviews or press conferences alongside journalists from different countries. Inevitably, amid our piercing questions about rom-com metanarratives and whether it was hard to wear a latex mask all day, there was always one otherwise silent reporter who would pipe up to identify themselves as representing the Ruritanian Gazette or the Freedonian Times. Their question was always along the same lines. Had Tom Cruise visited Ruritania/Freedonia? Had Meryl Streep an inspirational message for her Ruritanian/Freedonian fans? Would Jean-Claude Van Damme ever consider making a film in the beautiful mountain/maritime nation? The star would mumble something vaguely positive, we’d all swiftly move along, and the writer would able to return to their office clutching an attention-grabbing hook for their readers in the wretched, narcissistic hellhole they called home.

We’re all Ruritanians and Freedonians now. That glancing local reference is much more likely to make it into an online headline, for the very good reason that it helps in attracting viewers. The consequences may be fairly harmless, but the underlying trend is a little depressing.

Hot-button topics

More worrying is the incentive to foreground hot-button subjects, regardless of relevance. If an interviewee is asked about a topic currently rupturing the spleen of the internet, they’ll usually bat it away politely with something along the lines of “it’s an awful situation but I don’t feel qualified to comment”. If the published piece then ends up with a headline saying “(Insert controversial situation) is ‘awful’, says (insert famous name)”, it may not pose an immediate threat to the fabric of our civilisation, but it’s a bit grubby, and in the long term it cheapens the quality of discourse.

In the early days of digital media, some print readers took umbrage at online headlines which differed from the print versions of the same articles. It’s now accepted that this is a perfectly legitimate and necessary practice. What’s harder to pin down is the complex way in which trailers, headlines, social media posts and all the rest of the digital promotion paraphernalia are driven in a particular direction by interpretation of audience data. Extrapolate that from the relatively ephemeral world of entertainment journalism into all walks of life (don’t forget that politics is downstream from culture these days) and you end up with more cynicism, more hucksterism and less trust. You end up, in other words, with “Morgan vs Trump! The most explosive interview of the year!”