This sort of sensationalism, in general, is so completely ingrained into reporting that it's hard to separate from journalism itself. It's part of the journalistic style, an inevitability of the medium.

We see an article, click a link, by a paper, but we are never committing to more than a second or two of attention at a time. The headline makes you read the byline. The byline gets you reading the second sentence. At every step, a journalist loses most of her readers. The winning strategy is to increase "story," play to existing opinions, be sensational, use bait... There are flavours and degrees, but by and large writing like this is n inevitability of the medium, of journalism.

If you are reporting on programs that "developed a type of machine-English patois to communicate between themselves.." you are reporting on whether or not the skynet singularity is coming, almost certainly.

If we want something different, I think we'll need a medium change.

Personally, I was hoping e-readers would catalyze a new medium subtype: 30-100 page mini books. A lot of "news cycle.." the drip, drip, sensation of the day journalism just isn't a good way of understanding anything.

What happened between North Korea and the US this year? What's been happening with the Syrian war? Brexit as of July 2018...? I would be very happy to exchange the daily/weekly news bulletins for monthly/quarterly mini books.