USA Rice Vice President of Communications & Strategic Development
In early April, a spate of internet stories popped up, once again, about arsenic, brown rice, and white rice. You probably saw them. Someone probably sent one of them to you. Or all of them. They were sent to me many times over.
I got the New York Post’s “Brown Rice has 40% more of this toxic chemical than white rice,” and Fox News Digital’s “Brown rice far worse than white rice when it comes to toxins, study finds.” There was also “Study: Brown Rice Contains 40 Percent More Arsenic Than White Rice,” thanks Men’s Fitness, and there were others, including Verywell Health’s “Brown Rice Has More Arsenic Than White Rice. Is It Still a Healthy Choice?”
Let’s set the last one aside for a moment.
All the articles reference a Michigan State University study that was published in the journal Risk Analysis in February and then pushed out by the school’s PR team. All the articles pull snippets from the study (you can tell by the use of the distinctive phrase “earth’s crust,” from the study’s introduction), and all the articles share a scary headline. A headline engineered to make readers stop scrolling.
Because in today’s media landscape, attention is currency. The faster a headline can trigger outrage, fear, or curiosity, the more likely it is to be clicked, shared, and monetized. This incentive structure—driven by ad dollars and engagement algorithms—has turned news into a performance, rewarding the dramatic over the truthful, and the viral over the vital.
This time it was rice, but no topic is safe. Think about how many news stories The Media want you to read every day. You don’t have enough time to read five percent of them. Do you find yourself reading the ones where the headline or the graphic make you shake your head? Think, “What? No way! I have got to read this!”
You’ve been baited and you clicked.
But don’t feel badly, these media outlets spend a lot of money testing different words and sentence structures to increase the likelihood a person will click it. It’s their business and they’re good at it.
Recall above I mentioned the article from Verywell Health? Have you ever heard of it? I hadn’t before last week. You know why? I read their article about the study and it’s simply accurate. It isn’t sensational in any way. The second sentence of the article reads: “However, experts say arsenic exposure from rice is too low to cause long-term health problems.”
Factual. As was the headline. Brown rice does typically contain more arsenic than white rice. But the article, written by a dietitian, puts the study in context. And as a result, it’s kind of boring. Which is why it doesn’t get as many clicks as the Fox story. Which sounds terrifying, even though it’s about the very same study.
So what can we do about it? Well, the truth is, today’s media ecosystem is awash in bad incentives. Clicks and engagements mean dollars, so whatever delivers them is what they serve up. All you can do is opt out. Resist the urge to click. Don’t forward it. And I make note of the source and give them a mental demerit. Not only won’t I click this story, but I also won’t click the next three.
Am I making a difference? Maybe. I’m certainly trying to make conscious and deliberate decisions about the news I consume and share.
Clickbait headlines don’t just mislead; they crowd out the deeper conversations and understanding we need to have. The result? Policy debates that should be informed by agronomists, dietitians, and economists are instead shaped by influencers with no accountability and headlines optimized for emotion, not accuracy.
As the supercomputer says in 1983’s Wargames, “the only way to win, is not to play.”