So Anti-News It's Frustrating

As a regular reader (and clicker) of The Huffington Post, I understand the images they associate with each story/link. But I've noticed a trend that is so ridiculous, it makes me not want to go to the site or click on anything.

On the politics page Tuesday night, this is what I saw:

Those are 15 images of people who look angry, constipated, drunk or on the verge of a serious ailment. And it's not just the politics page. I clicked on the media page and spotted this right away:

As one who regularly posts stories to the Interwebs and occasionally must grab an image not from stock but from video, even if it's a story about someone I don't like, I try not to take a still that would make the person look anything like those poor people.

It's not that this "news" site should be trying to give some impression that it's fair and balanced. After all, here's what the front page of Drudge Report looked like at the same time:

It's like these pictures are meant to move me (and anyone else who gets riled up by an unflattering/inflammatory picture) to click RIGHT NOW to read a story that's going to be nowhere near as sexy as the image.

And that's not right.

It's frustrating. If these sites didn't sometimes have news content that could come in handy, I'd skip them. Since they don't, I'd like to hope that the people who handle these sites could be a little more responsible and choose an image that better tells the story. Otherwise, they might as well just post something like this:

And people, that's not even Photoshopped. That's a REAL song! However, it perfectly sums up what I've been looking at lately.