NEW YORK CITY, New York –
Online news source, Huffington Post, has finally conceded that its headlines are sometimes a little “over-the-top.” The news aggregator, known for click-baiting, exaggerated links which often border on the absurd, have had some of the more sensationalized headlines on the web, including “Jennifer Lawrence Overdoses On The Bronzer,’ ‘Hillary Clinton Accused of Facelift,’ and ‘Crop Circles Created By Wallabies ‘Stoned’ On Opium’
“We sometimes overdo it,” said founder, Arianna Huffington. “It’s all for a good cause though. We want people to read the news. And if we simply wrote, ‘Poisoned Wallabies Leave Marks on Ground’, who on earth would read it? It doesn’t undermine the accuracy of our sources. No, it just makes the goings on in the world more relevant.”
The Huffington Post has come under fire in the past for their dramatized headlines by satirists such as John Oliver. Oliver ‘literally destroyed a pinata’ in 2014, in response to the Post’s constant assurance that he’d ‘destroyed’, ‘decimated’ or ‘hung from a lightbulb in the basement’ various politicians around the world.
“I have great respect for Miss Huffington and her service,” he told viewers. “But she sometimes makes me sound like a bulldozer, when in reality I’m a television personality. I don’t want any more people making that mistake.”
Others, such as comedian Eddie Murphy and writer Jane Austen, have simply stated that SEO-based news is literally destroying what we once called honest media.
“They’re tearing the world of journalism to pieces!” they lamented together. “Whatever shall we do?”
Sources at the Huffington Post, however, indicated that we should not look forward to a change in style. Apparently, “the click-baiting is working. Why would we stop? If anything, results demand more of the same. It’s a new era in journalism – one where satire is less exaggerated than real news.”
Empire News had no comment on their own headlines, except to say “Hey, but we’re not real news.”