It was January of 2009 when I wrote this post. The gist of it was bloggers were getting into a bad habit of putting question marks in the titles of their posts. If they weren’t sure something was factual or if they wanted to drum up click-throughs and get more commenters, they’d pose a question. Basically, a question mark was lazy journalism. Instead of me writing some thoughts about a new pair of headphones on this blog, I’d instead write “Is this the last pair of headphones I ever buy?” No, there’s no way those would be the last ones I’d ever buy. I’m 29. Do I really want to insinuate that these headphones will last 50 years? I’m not a jerk but this is a real headline bloggers use often.
I close out that 2009 post with:
CNN.com doesn’t have any posts with question marks so why should you be able to?
Well, today I visited CNN.com as I do once a week to validate an assumption of mine and I noticed a few posts with question marks in them. I did a CTRL+F for “?” and found 14 headlines with question marks.
Could it be? The slow-decay of real journalism over the last 7 years where these Internet-raised J-school drop-outs have graduated from Gawker to CNN and have infected real media with the question mark epidemic.
Sigh.
For those wondering what I search for on CNN, I do a weekly self-poll where I visit CNN.com and do a search for Trump and then a search for Clinton and compare how many matches there are. Trump has been winning for 6 months. Things he says generates far more page-views for CNN than things that Clinton says. The media has propped him up since the beginning, first as a joke then as a running-joke since they have to keep covering it since fair-press means the GOP nominee for President shouldn’t be completely ignored. He has double the amount of posts about him over his opponent yet he’s losing in most polls.