> When the media gets called out, it issues a retraction.
And by then it's too late: the headlines have been seen by the masses, and they're asking their friends, "Hey did you hear about...?", and they're adding it to their mental models of the world. The media source doesn't suffer; in fact they have already profited from the clickbait, so there's virtually no incentive to not publish false or barely researched stories, even if they later put two sentences of "Note:" at the bottom, which they actively discourage people from reading to anyway.
And by then it's too late: the headlines have been seen by the masses, and they're asking their friends, "Hey did you hear about...?", and they're adding it to their mental models of the world. The media source doesn't suffer; in fact they have already profited from the clickbait, so there's virtually no incentive to not publish false or barely researched stories, even if they later put two sentences of "Note:" at the bottom, which they actively discourage people from reading to anyway.