It's Not News, It's Fark
How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
A hilarious exposé on the media gone awry, from the creator of the wildly popular Fark.com
Have you ever noticed certain patterns in the news you see and read each day? Perhaps it’s the blatant fear-mongering in the absence of facts on your local six o’clock news (“Tsunami could hit the Atlantic any day!” Everybody panic!), or the seasonal articles that appear year after year (“Roads will be crowded this holiday season.” Thanks, AAA.). It’s Not News, It’s Fark is Drew Curtis’s clever examination of the state of the media today and a hilarious look at the go-to stories mass media uses when there’s just not enough hard news to fill a newspaper or a news broadcast. Drew exposes eight stranger-than-fiction media patterns that prove just how little reporting is going on in the world of reporters today. It’s Not News, It’s Fark examines all the “news” that was never fit for print in the first place, and promises to have you laughing along the way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The editorial principle behind Curtis's Web Site Fark.com is remarkably simple: readers submit news stories with their own wacky headlines, inviting snarky commentary from other readers. Here, he steps back to examine why "Mass Media" keeps churning out the sort of inane stories that are "supposed to look like news" that make the site so wildly popular. The critique is familiarsee Barry Glassner's "The Culture of Fear", among othersbut Curtis delivers it with richly sarcastic humor. A section on hysteria over unlikely disasters, for example, punctures alarmist stories with one-line synopses like "Oh my God, there's bacteria on everything." Other chapters explore fake news trends, such as "Equal Time for Nutjobs," which explains how 9/11 conspiracy theories manage to get public airing, or the proliferation of nonevents that are little more than publicity stunts. But the anger behind his criticisms of media companies for producing such nonsense is defused by the acknowledgment that readers actually want to be titillated. Unfortunately, the pleasure of reading Fark.com online, where you can always add your own two cents to the conversation, doesn't always translate to the printed page; old user comments aren't so much comic relief as tacked-on disruption. "" .
