Typical pattern: “Scientists find something strange when they look at a common whatever - and it’s not good!”
This kind of crap used to be the style of little blurbs at the side or the bottom of an article, but it’s in the headlines now. Until you click the headline you don’t even really know what the article is about anymore - just the general topic area, with maybe a fear trigger.
Clicking on the headline is going to display ads, but at that point the goal isn’t to get you to buy anything yet, it’s just to generate ad impressions, which the content provider gets paid for regardless of whether you even see the ads. It’s a weird meta-revenue created by the delivery mechanism, and it has altered the substance of headlines, and our expectations of what “headline” even means.
It’s not new, it’s just adapted to the media format.
Getting people to read the news and the ads between articles is how the game is designed.
Journalism classes has always educated this.
If you had been an adult during a decade or two before the Internet you would know that a headline used to sum up the basics of a story. For example, picking a random 1980s headline: “Six US embassy aides escape from Iran”. Nowadays that would be more like, “US admits Iran plot.”
I took some journalism classes in the 90’s (and then decided it wasn’t for me), and my SO was a journalist around the same time.
Congrats, I’ve been reading news headlines since I was a kid in the 60s.