Just Finished - It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News

It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News by Drew Curtis, founder of Fark.com - Every time I see Nancy Grace on television, I have an urge to destroy the television. Come to think of it, I feel the same way every time I see Bill O'Really [sic.], Larry King, Stone Phillips, Geraldo Rivera... Heck, I've even started hating Katie Couric, and nobody hates Katie, do they? I feel like the guy in that movie who went around saying, "I've had it up to here and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" We don't get news anymore. What we get is pure, unadulterated crap. And I'm sick of it. So when I came across this book at Barnes & Noble the other day, I figured I'd found a book that'd make me feel like I was beating up on all of 'em. And I was right! A satisfying read it was! And funny, too.

Drew Curtis, the author of the book is a news hound who used to email news stories to all his friends until one day he decided to quit sending them out and told his friends if they wanted to read interesting news stories, he'd post them on a website and they could come take a look, themselves. Before he knew it, people were sending HIM stories and now Fark.com is the busiest news-aggregate website on the net. Curtis's pet peeve is also mine -- the absolute crap that the news media pass off as news that's not really news, what he's termed Fark.

According to Curtis, news had degenerated into about four or five categories:

Fearmongering -- this includes terrorists, natural disasters, global warming, pandemic illnesses, meteors hurtling through space toward earth, etc. that are all supposed to make us panic.

Missing White Chicks -- It's true. Have you noticed how much news time missing white chicks and missing white kids get on national news? Since when was this a global or even national concern? It's local news masquerading as Big News.

Unpaid Advertising Placement Masquerading as Actual News -- Top-ten lists, movie stars' opinions on antidepressants, Banned TV commercials that the advertisers intentionally made so they'd be banned. All of these are designed to bring attention to the star's latest movie, the magazine's latest issue, the store's latest clothing line. And it works. Sales go up in direct inverse proportion to the buying public's instinct for bait-and-switch.

Seasonal Articles - These include how bad the traffic is going to be this Christmas, how hot it's going to be this July 4, how busy the stores will be the day after Thanksgiving. It's the same thing, year after year. It never changes, and they still roll it out and make us listen to it all over again.

Bellybutton Contemplation - Okay. That's sort of my moniker for it. It's the media talking about whether the media has gone too far in covering certain stories, or about how someone got in trouble for plagiarizing the news. The media love to talk about themselves as if they're as important as the news they're not reporting.

So that's basically the meat of the book. But the best part about the whole thing is Curtis's well-honed sense of humor. I laughed out loud so many times, I had to finally slink into the other bedroom so my husband could get some sleep. Some of my favorite passages from the book:

"Equal Time for Nutjobs"

Journalists are taught to give equal time to both sides of a story.... But in some cases, there flat-out isn't another side. Take moon landings, for example. Any time moon landings are mentioned in the media they always have to go get a paragraph of comment from the nutjobs who think the moon landing was faked.

"Media Fatigue"

Having no new information [on a developing story] is the bane of Mass Media. ....so if you want to continue to report on something, you've got to start exploring Other Angles. Right after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, a Fox News reporter on a live feed interviewed the first person he saw: a man walking a dog.

REPORTER: You're live on Fox News Channel. What are you doing?

MAN (INCREDULOUS): Walking a dog.

REPORTER: Wh-why are you still here? I'm-I'm just curious.

MAN (SLIGHT STUNNED PAUSE): None of your [***ing] business!

REPORTER: Oh, that was a good answer, wasn't it? That was live on air on national television; thanks so much for that.

MAN: Well, you know...(continuous yelling at the reporter)
[National desk cuts live audio feed]


HAR! I've seen this sort of thing myself. I remember a few years ago during the big Malibu conflagration, seeing a news reporter come up to a harried-looking firefighter who was shoveling dirt over dry brush:

"Sir, can you please tell us what you're doing?" to which he responded (paraphrasing), "Can you please get the hell out of the way? We're trying to fight a fire here."


Curtis tells a hilarious story about news coverage on a terrorism drill at a Kentucky goat show.

"Homeland Security's explanation for the staged attack: 'Kentucky is one of the nation's top five goat-producing states...'"

Curtis then points out that if they say top five, then it's number five. "Because if Kentucky were the number one goat-producing state, they would say that instead. I've lived in Kentucky most of my life and have never seen a goat farm. They're probably around somewhere, but my point is, it likely doesn't take a lot of goats to be the number five goat-producing state."

He outlines other hilarities with headlines like, "Oh, my God! There's bacteria on everything!"

The only drawback to the book is that if you're not internet savvy, a lot of what he's talking about won't make much sense to you. I'd really like to give this book to my father, but he'd be completely baffled by the reader's comments from the website at the end of each section. He'd just never figure out that "MyNameisMofuga" is someone's internet alterego.

But for those of you who've joined the 21st Century and actually go onto the internet as well as read the news, this is a book that will have you laughing uproarously, satisfied in the knowledge that it's not just you -- the news really is crap.

www.bambooks.biz

Just Finished -- The Darling

The Darling by Russell Banks -- My first introduction to Russell Banks was an afternoon in the car, driving toward New Orleans and listening to This American Life on National Public Radio. I'd chanced upon it while changing stations between towns and happened to catch it at the very beginning of Banks's reading of Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story about a narcissistic man's affair with a homely woman. It was good-- the kind of story where you hear lines and think, "Wow. I wish I'd written that." It stayed with me for a long time. But there was something "off" about it. And I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Until I read The Darling.
The Darling is the story of Hannah Musgrave, a 59-year-old woman who owns a farm in the Adirondacks and whose life remains a mystery to everyone around her. Through her narrative, Hannah tells us about how she had been a priviledged child of the '60's and a member of the violent radical Weather Underground, who fled the United States and began life anew as the wife of a mid-level bureaucrat in the African country of Liberia.
It is the story of her life as a wife to her African husband, a mother to her three African children and caretaker of a number of chimpanzees in an American pharmaceutical research facility in Liberia, and her betrayal of virtually everyone who loved her -- her parents, her friends, her children, her husband, her chimpanzees -- against the backdrop of the turbulent '60s and the political upheaval surrounding Liberia's civil war.
I had a difficult time reading this book, mainly because the main character was so unsympathetic. Frankly, if I hadn't been stuck at my daughter's school for three hours, I might've put it down and not finished it.
Oddly enough, I got the impression that Banks wanted us to feel sympathy for Hannah. Banks did a wonderful job in his portrayal of Hannah's mother, whose clueless narcissism helped explain Hannah's own self-centered nature. But it failed to excuse it, and I got the feeling after finishing the novel that he hadn't quite fleshed Hannah out completely, even though she seemed aware that she was selfish and was not able to feel the proper emotions a wife; friend; daughter; and, particularly, mother; should feel.
He never quite completely developed the character, and it occurs to me that this is what bothered me about Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story. Perhaps it's intentional. Narcissists aren't fully developed characters. They are, instead, two-dimensional creatures incapable of the full range of real human emotions and empathy. If that's the case, he succeeded brilliantly.
The only real emotional attachment Hannah makes throughout the story is for the chimpanzees in her care, and I never could quite figure out why. The background story of Liberia's history is fascinating, and there is real tension in the plot.
I have read stories by Banks, however, that are simply wonderful. Rule of the Bone was brilliant, and I recommend it to all. I also recommend Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story. It's a fine piece of writing that left me mulling over it for weeks after I heard it. To hear it read by Banks, himself, on This American Life, go to: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1059

www.bambooks.biz