The aspect of digital journalism that has emerged as the most conspicuously prevalent and the most consistently lamented is, not surprisingly, the culture of clickbait, the branch of oft-ridiculed tactics that have reduced reader engagement to a series of rapid clicks. Along the way, the Internet has been increasingly implanted with a massive web of advertising methods, algorithms, and artificial intelligence that is becoming exponentially incomprehensible. Formulaic structures have now replaced what was once the art of headline creation, that opportunity for the pithiness and wit of copywriters to flourish (the New York Post notwithstanding).
Of the many derivative headline templates currently being (over) used, the most glaring offender in both frequency and methodology is the phrase, “and that’s a good thing.” A quick search on Google will yield a multi-outlet offering of headlines with this exact phrase appended to them in just the past week. With the increasing repetition of this suffixal phrase, “and that’s a good thing” has become more than just another clickbait cliché to laugh at; it’s a command from the publication using it to comply with whatever current cultural narrative is being imposed. It has been used to say that inflation is good, manufacturing jobs are bad, the border wall is beneficial now that Biden is implementing it, the side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines are medically necessary, the human race will benefit from becoming cyborgs, and on, and on (in that final example, at least Chicago Booth conceded a bit for their take on the cyborg topic, their headline reading, “The Robots Are Coming, and That’s (Mostly) a Good Thing”).
The motive for repeatedly adding on those simple five words may at first seem to be comparable to that of other classic clickbait methods – the enticing yet innocent headlines that used to plaster websites like, “This Outrageous Truth About Gummy Bears Will Destroy Your World,” à la Buzzfeed or The Chive – but one doesn’t even have to click any longer, as the final message of the author is made blatantly clear before anyone has even read the first sentence. Pageviews are no longer the goal, changed views are. “And that’s a good thing”, paired as it most often is with more serious political and technological articles, isn’t a preview of some light amusement to come, but of dogma; this is no longer the clickbait for viral videos or miracle creams, but rather the clickbait for establishment policy.
These days, establishment policy can be found everywhere, and it now openly and increasingly asserts itself as the arbiter of cultural mores, as opposed to culture reflecting the people. But it was always this way, just not as obvious. Andrew Breitbart famously said, “Politics is downstream from culture,” but those who set the narratives have long since attempted to establish culture downstream from their politics. As a result, this headline formula is even deployed to influence opinions on American entertainment – because now even movie opinions have to be political – and to poor effect.
One of the earliest online reactions to the use of the phrase is in a Reddit post on r/movies from May 2018 titled, “Attn. Journalists: For the love of God, stop putting ‘and that’s a good thing’ at the end of all your headlines.” The post that followed was nothing more than a list of recent film articles from entertainment magazines using that headline-ending phrase, especially concerning the release of the 2018 Disney Star Wars film Solo. The post gained tens of thousands of upvotes, reflecting the reality that we’re a culture that would prefer to make up its own mind. Since when do people have to be convinced to enjoy the movies and shows that they usually, effortlessly, enjoyed? Since the goal of entertainment stopped being about the entertaining. The deliberate disconnect between the producers and their audience becomes visible when journalists have to affirm the positive qualities of one of the largest film franchises in history to its historically loyal viewers. It was the now unavoidable increasing infiltration of this narrative enforcement into such random, seemingly politics-free, topics that started to unnerve me and led me to search for its source.
When exactly the phrase originated in this context is a tricky question. If a manual of headline templates exists that gets passed around between these copywriters, they haven’t released it (I also, unfortunately, don’t have an account with today’s JournoList equivalent, if one exists, and certainly all available evidence seems to point to that being the case). I did locate references back to the 1990’s – the earliest example being the title of a book written by postmodern author Stanley Fish called “There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech, and it’s a Good Thing, Too” in 1994 (as well as Bernie Sanders’ spoken use of the phrase in 1985 to praise bread lines). The phrase continued appearing in book and news article titles in the early 2000s, before increasing in mainstream media frequency around the mid-2010s.
But, no one was directly writing it; all I could find were underground references like the aforementioned Reddit post. A thread was posted on the website ResetEra also in 2018, which contained many complaints from random users, there was a Know Your Meme page entry that never went anywhere, but, unsurprisingly, no “professionals” contextualizing their lockstep narrative strategies. The dystopian satire video You Will be Happy” by the YouTube account “Leonardo of Biz,” briefly references the phrase (at 0:38). Released on September 11th, 2021, it has gained just short of one million views.
Beyond these countercultural examples that I came across, further browser and digital library searches proved fruitless, with even statistical studies of headline keywords yielding nothing substantial. Again, it seems that clickbait journalists rarely behoove themselves to publish focused criticism on the credibility of their industry as a whole. And why would they write about how repetitive and out of touch their methodology is? Have they even noticed how often they use it? Within the realm of the establishment’s formulaic prose, “and that’s a good thing” signifies a departure not only of style but, more importantly, of motive, in an eerily authoritarian direction. This alone makes it worthy of attention and discussion, and not just from the targets left to complain and object in chatrooms and comment sections, unheard, and if heard, ignored.
