The Onion

While I don't agree with the author's contention that mainstream newspapers should begin emulating The Onion, I do agree with his assessment of why we like it so much:

One reason The Onion isn’t taken more seriously is that it’s actually fun to read. In 1985 the cultural critic Neil Postman published the influential Amusing Ourselves to Death, which warned of the fate that would befall us if public discourse were allowed to become substantially more entertaining than, say, a Neil Postman book. Today newspapers are eager to entertain—in their Travel, Food, and Style sections, that is. But even as scope creep has made the average big-city tree killer less portable than a 10-year-old laptop, hard news invariably comes in a single flavor: Double Objectivity Sludge.

Too many high priests of journalism still see humor as the enemy of seriousness: If the news goes down too easily, it can’t be very good for you. But do The Onion and its more fact-based acolytes, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, monitor current events and the way the news media report on them any less rigorously than, say, the Columbia Journalism Review or USA Today?

During the last few years, multiple surveys by the Pew Research Center and the Annenberg Public Policy Center have found that viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are among America’s most informed citizens. Now, it may be that Jon Stewart isn’t making anyone smarter; perhaps America’s most informed citizens simply prefer comedy over the stentorian drivel the network anchormannequins dispense. But at the very least, such surveys suggest that news sharpened with satire doesn’t cause the intellectual coronaries Postman predicted. Instead, it seems to correlate with engagement.

Read the story here.

Bad Journalism

I have always been an armchair critic of journalists, especially non-print ones. You know, the ones who ask athletes after they win a championship, "How does it feel to win this?" As if we don't already know the answer to questions like these, or almost all of the questions they ask, for that matter.

The best interviewer in sports journalism, Jim Gray, was pilloried in the press for daring to ask Pete Rose some pointed questions during the All-Star game. I think it's because we're not used to people asking good questions. Generally, I believe that non-print journalists get their jobs because they look or sound good, not because they have any talent at writing, speaking or thinking.

Case in point: This idiot at NPR named Luke Burbank. He posted an interview he did with the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, in which we get to see, in under six minutes, a man slowly die due to a lack of cooperation in his interview subjects. It truly is squirm-inducing to see how terribly this interview goes. Burbank blames the band, but it's entirely Burbank's fault.

I don't know what journalism school Burbank went to, but he must have skipped school the day they taught about open questions. You know, the kind that can't be answered with a yes or a no? I counted the number of questions he asked in the interview, then categorized them.

Number of questions asked: 17

yes/no questions: 12

Number of non-yes/no questions that simply asked an either/or question, not an open question: 3

Total number of questions that could be considered truly open questions: 2

See bad journalism at work here.

News?

We all know that Fox News has never been a paragon of objective journalism. Now, hard-hitting Fox News has started to show signs of...well...not being a news organization any more.

When unexplained violence takes center stage, we tend to turn to modern psychology to explain it.

But there is an alternative explanation, one that has been played out in film, stage and writings since the beginning of history.

Was Cho Seung-Hui schizophrenic … psychotic … manic-depressive? Or were the shooting deaths of 32 people, including Cho himself, at Virginia Tech University part of the ongoing struggle between God and Satan … good against evil … lightness and darkness?

Could Cho have been possessed by the Devil? Could that explain the massacre at Virginia Tech?

Dr. Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University, shouts an unequivocal “Yes!”

“Based on what I’ve seen in the news," Roberts said in an interview, "there’s no doubt that this act was Satanic in origin."

With "news" like this, is satire possible any more? Read the article here.