Book review: It's Not News, It's FARK

Browsing through the media section of our very decent public library [The indecent one is two streets over. Ed.] I came across It's Not News, It's FARK, by Drew Curtis. (Gotham Books, 2007)

It wasn't the title that intrigued me so much as the subtitle: How mass media tries to pass off crap as news. This is something that bothers me virtually every time I watch a local or network newscast. I wish I had a stopwatch so I could note the amount of time spent on real, "hard" news (e.g. a suicide bomb attack in Sweden) as opposed to Charmaine-soft news (e.g. the suicide of a drug-raddled "celebrity" famous for being famous).

Drew Curtis defines "fark" as "what fills space when mass media runs out of news.... Fark is supposed to look like news, but it's not news". (He says that the origin of the word "fark" is not his attempt to find another euphemism for the Great Anglo-Saxon Monosyllable. Rather it just leapt into his mind one night when he'd been drinking.)

Writing in a jugular vein [jocular, surely! Ed.], the author analyzes and gives examples of eight media patterns which any news junkie will recognize.

• Media Fearmongering -- What would happen if some wildly improbable event occurred? Like the death of millions from "Mexican swine flu". Of course the event never happens and probably never will.
• Unpaid Placement Masquerading as Actual Article -- Not like product placement in a TV show or movie. Rather, running a press release promoting something (a book for instance), no more than a commercial in disguise. Sometimes these are labelled as "advertorials", sometimes not.
• Headline Contradicted by Article Text -- Since most people only read the headlines, especially on the Internet "news" sites, most people never notice.
• Equal Time for Nutjobs -- A great idea when the subject is debatable, like immigration reform, but ridiculous when there simply isn't another side, like whether the earth is round and when the Maple Laffs will win the Stanley Cup.
• The Out-of-Context Celebrity Comment -- The Dixie Chicks didn't like President Bush's foreign policy. So what?!
• Seasonal Articles -- People trampled in Black Friday shopping frenzy. Airports expected to be crowded at Thanksgiving. This is news?!
• Media Fatigue -- Especially in America, we get saturation coverage of an event (serious or trivial) for about a day, then the media and consumers of media get tired of it. After the initial feeding frenzy, the media have no new info to report, so they find another story.
• Lesser Media Space Fillers -- Mr. Curtis's examples are: missing white chicks, plane crashes, and amputations of random body parts.

It's Not News, It's Fark didn't make me laugh out loud. Actually I wanted to cry or throw up, maybe both. But if you want a clear statement of why you're not getting much solid stuff, as opposed to bland pap, in your newspaper or on the airwaves, you'll want to read this.

Oh, by the way... Drew Curtis is the creator of a "news" site, http://www.fark.com/. Don't say Walt is guilty of Sin No. 2. But if you're wondering where the screaming morning DJs get those little factoids of weird news, visit the Farking site!