It has become fashionable to describe recommendation algorithms as the reason news coverage skews toward outrage and spectacle, as though a golden era of purely editorial judgment preceded them. It didn't.
Front pages have chased scandal, tragedy, and conflict since long before any newsroom had a personalization engine. What's different now isn't the incentive — it's that the incentive is finally visible in a dashboard instead of hidden behind an editor's gut instinct.
That visibility is uncomfortable, and uncomfortable in a useful way. A metric that quantifies what already-existing bias rewards is not the same thing as creating the bias. Blaming the measurement tool lets the underlying judgment call off the hook entirely.
The right response isn't nostalgia for a pre-algorithmic newsroom that was, by most honest accounts, no less prone to chasing attention. It's building better feedback loops for the humans who still make the final call on what leads the page.