You'll Never BELIEVE Which Site Has Been Criticized for Clickbait Headlines!!!

The L.A. Times this morning published an article about a list of misleading Internet sites to avoid, put together by a Massachusetts college professor.

During the election, many people fell prey to fake news stories on social media — even the president-elect ended up retweeting fake statistics. A professor of communication has created a list of unreliable news sites to help people do better.

Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of communication at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, put together a publicly available Google doc cataloging “False, misleading, clickbait-y and satirical ‘news’ sources.” It’s been making the rounds on social media as people seek to cleanse their newsfeeds of misinformation.

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The usual suspects are there: Breitbart, Drudge Report, etc. [CORRECTION: Drudge is not listed; a Drudge knock-off is. Coffee BEFORE blogging, Patterico!] (No Gateway Pundit. I guess Jim Hoft has the professor’s seal of approval.) Oddly enough, there are barely any left-leaning sites on the list — the main exception being openly satirical sites, like the Borowitz report. Missing from the list is, for example, the L.A. Times itself . . . an organization that I spent years revealing as fact-challenged. Andrew Breitbart once asked me to count up how many corrections I had obtained from them over the years. I stopped counting around 42. And that was years ago — and that’s just the stuff that a) was bad enough for me to write them about and b) they agreed with me about after reading my email correcting them.

But here’s the part that really made me laugh. The professor has different categories for inclusion, including irresponsible outrage sites, unreliable sites, openly satirical sites, and sites that “sometimes use clickbait-y headlines and social media descriptions.” Guess which site was tagged for clickbait-y headlines?

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list-of-supposedly-fake-sites

That’s right. One RedState.com.

Guess which site was not tagged for clickbait-y headlines?

Buzzfeed.

I think my point is clear enough. Don’t you?

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