Question

In June 2016, Huffington Post and Mail Online reported that three-year-old Victoria Wilcher, who had suffered facial scarring, had been kicked out of a KFC because she was frightening customers. Later, KFC announced that no evidence had been found to support the story. This phenomenon is largely a product of the increasing pressure in newsrooms that care more about traffic figures.

Brooke Binkowski, an editor, says that, during her career, she has seen a shift towards less editorial oversight in newsrooms. “Clickbait is king, so newsrooms will uncritically print something unreal. Not all newsrooms are like this, but a lot of them are.”

Asked what the driving factor was, a journalist said, “You’ve an editor breathing down your neck and you have to meet your targets. And there are some young journalists on the market who are inexperienced and who will not do those checks. So much news that is reported online happens online. There is no need to get out and knock on someone’s door. You just sit at your desk and do it.”

Another journalist says, “There is definitely pressure to churn out (粗制滥造) stories in order to get clicks, because they equal money. At my former employer in particular, the pressure was on due to the limited resources. That made the environment quite horrible to work in.”

In a February 2017 report for Digital Journalism, Craig Silverman wrote, “Today the bar for what is worth giving attention to seems to be much lower. Within minutes or hours, a badly sourced report can be changed into a story that is repeated by dozens of news websites, resulting in tens of thousands of shares. Once a certain critical mass is reached, repetition has a powerful effect on belief. The rumor(传闻) becomes true for readers simply by virtue of its ubiquity.”

And, despite the direction that some newsrooms seem to be heading in, a critical eye is becoming more, not less important, according to the New York Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan. “Reporters and editors have to be more careful than ever before. It’s extremely important to question and to use every verification(验证) method available before publication.” Yet those working in newsrooms talk of doubtful stories being tolerated because, in the words of some senior editors, “a click is a click, regardless of the advantage of a story”. And, “if the story does turn out to be false, it’s simply a chance for another bite at the cherry.”

Verification and fact-checking are regularly falling victim to the pressure to bring in the numbers, and if the only result of being caught out is another chance to bring in the clicks, that looks unlikely to change.

1.According to Brooke Binkowski, newsrooms produce false news because _____.

A. clicks matter a lot B. resources are limited

C. budgets are inadequate D. journalists lack experience

2.What does the underlined sentence in Paragraph 5 probably mean?

A. Lies can’t sell without an atom of truth.

B. Rumors are like a flame blown by the wind.

C. You can hear rumors, but you can’t know them.

D. A lie, repeated often enough, will end up as truth.

3.What’s Margaret Sullivan’s attitude towards false news online?

A. Negative. B. Supportive.

C. Skeptical. D. Neutral.

4.What is the passage mainly about?

A. Consequences of false stories. B. Causes of online false news.

C. Incompetence of journalists. D. A craze to get clicks.

Answer 1