Beware the Summer Snakes

O scar Wilde observed: “Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist.” I know there is nothing more cliché than a writer criticizing the press, but the era of viral news requires us to remember that the sensational kind of journalism that used to rear its ugly head in summer is now a daily fixture all year-round.

But especially in summer. Clickbait has proved Oscar Wilde right.

This kind of coverage has roots. To pick just one example: In July 1993, the attack on Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb forces had been going on for over a year. The city was being hit by an average of 329 shells per day, causing countless casualties. The international press covered the siege with decreasing intensity, as in all wars, until July 30, 1993. On that day, a five-year-old girl, Irma Hadžimuratović, was wounded by shelling, and her life depended on an evacuation.

She was of course neither the first nor the only seriously wounded child there, but her case, at a time of year when parliaments are closed and political news tends to slow, became the big story that summer, giving rise to Operation Irma, in which several countries organized airlifts to evacuate the injured to hospitals. While well-intentioned, the plan was disastrous and ineffective, but the operation received unprecedented press coverage until September, when the front pages were once again full of politicians and their antics — and the idea of evacuating the wounded on camera was abandoned.

A modern version of Operation Irma was the much-hyped, real-time tracking of the Titan submarine search. I followed it, too, even listening to streams from YouTubers claiming that the sub was abducted by aliens and was now traveling to a moon of Saturn, which seemed to me the most plausible and, above all, the most clickable take.

There are many terms in many languages for this type of news story at this particular time of year. The French speak of the morte-saison (dead season), the Germans of sommerloch (summer hole), and in Spain, my favorite, it is called serpiente de verano (summer snake), an allusion to the trend of news about the Loch Ness Monster during vacation time. It is fair to say that this has always been the case: The news of Sarah’s pregnancy at age 90 reported in Genesis is probably the first summer snake in history.

In 2023, this practice continues: sensational headlines, old stories that are told as novelty, and a battery of other tactics to try to cover the hole caused by the reality that, in general, while people are sitting on their deck chairs at the beach, they are not committing major attacks, they’re not breaking into banks, not resigning, not winning league titles, and not passing big laws during prime-time.

I’m sure that, like me, you were shocked to read the detailed chronicle of the old woman who died after being attacked by a herd of wild monkeys (in Telangana, India), or the account of the mother who poisoned her son’s classmate for getting better grades than him (in Puducherry, also India), or even the story of how a high-school student found the fossil of a Cretaceous crocodile egg (in China). It’s all news that you read with relish until you discover that it happened thousands of miles away in parts of the world that don’t show up in much detail on Google Maps; and it doesn’t really connect with the bigger issues of our day.

Clickbait makes it very difficult for quality journalism to be profitable, because there is more to be gained from reporting on men eating live dogs in Vietnam or that it is raining turtles in Tanzania than from, well, something explaining that there is nothing to report because everyone is on vacation. We often complain about the time wasted on clickbait, but most news consumers seem convinced that there is not much they can do other than complain.

Actually, there is something we can do, although it is not a sure thing because it requires willpower: not clicking on the garbage. At present, the power of users is, as always, in their wallets (what they pay for) and in their fingers (what they click on). Trash TV shows end when the audience drops, and clickbait journalism will die when we stop clicking on news of the man who was born with three heads. The alternative is to continue down this path until the entire paper becomes a monograph on the possible nonbinary identity of the Loch Ness Monster; and I trust I’m not giving ideas to the summer interns at the Times.