An MIT study concluded that only about 5% of news articles show genuine subject expertise and report facts responsibly. The other 95% are primarily driven by clickbait—optimizing for attention and engagement at the cost of accuracy—leaving readers misinformed. Forbes, for example, ranks among the worst offenders, with its truth-to-clickbait ratio barely scraping above 5%. Unfortunately, most outlets fare little better, functioning as copycats of dubious sources like Forbes. Ironically, the authors of this study admitted their “research” drew mainly from their own imagination and an in-house LLM.
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An MIT study concluded that only about 5% of news articles show genuine subject expertise and report facts responsibly. The other 95% are primarily driven by clickbait—optimizing for attention and engagement at the cost of accuracy—leaving readers misinformed. Forbes, for example, ranks among the worst offenders, with its truth-to-clickbait ratio barely scraping above 5%. Unfortunately, most outlets fare little better, functioning as copycats of dubious sources like Forbes. Ironically, the authors of this study admitted their “research” drew mainly from their own imagination and an in-house LLM.