Investigative journalism is never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down – especially when a celebrity breakup threatens to bury important news about Donald Trump.

A handful of frustrated journalists used the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie divorce on Tuesday to lure online readers into clicking an investigative story about Donald Trump's finances, in a rare effort to promote what they felt was the more important news story. One journalist tweeted the Trump story with the message "wow, so THIS is why Angelina left," while others shared it using the hashtag #Brangelina, to thrust the story into the stream of celebrity news.

Readers were being directed to a Washington Post story about Trump's use of his charitable organization. According to the story, Trump used $258,000 from his charitable organization to settle lawsuits for his for-profit businesses, which may violate the United States' "self-dealing" laws.

Emma Roller, a contributing writer to the New York Times opinion page, tweeted the original misleading comment with the article, but several others retweeted her to keep the ruse going. "OMG! Read this," Hadas Gold, a reporter for Politico, wrote in a retweet of Roller's message.

wow, so THIS is why Angelina left https://t.co/9iKV3SowMx — Emma Roller (@emmaroller) September 20, 2016

The Columbia Journalism Review called it a case of "Rickrolling," an online tactic of duping someone to click on a link that leads to something unrelated (such as a Rick Astley music video).

"The tactic is part-joke, partly a means of capitalizing on readers' outsized interest in celebrities, and partly an expression of exasperation about hard-reported, important journalism getting buried by stories about famous people," wrote the CJR's Nauiscaa Renner.

Tweeting a misleading link can put a journalist into shady ethical territory, as Renner points out. However, Roller's tweet also clearly shows a preview of the Trump story, so it's debatable whether she was fully misleading readers or merely presenting the Trump story in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

The Canadian Association of Journalists says accuracy is a "moral imperative" for journalists, regardless of the medium. "We consider all content carefully, including blogging, and content posted to social media," says the CAJ's ethics guidelines.

"Defending the public's interest includes… preventing the public from being misled," the CAJ guidelines say.

However, one Twitter user argued that Roller's Rickrolling tweet could be considered "the first documented case of responsible clickbait."