Fluff wins

By media farm

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GENERALLY, THANKSGIVING IS a slow news season. The government shuts down and scandals fizzle for 24 hours, because, hey, even the feds and Channel 5 have to leave Chuck Turner alone long enough to feast on the blood of a live turkey! This is the time when fluff thrives. The most interesting thing that's on TV is coverage of the lines outside Best Buy on Thursday night, and Martha Stewart teaching Snoop Dog how she makes mashed potatoes as he scoffs at her favoring white pepper over black pepper while serenading her with the Parkay jingle. Our only other option is watching former-actual-journalists-cum-boring-television-"personalities" like Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer prattle on about giant animals taking over 77th Street.

So, you would think that the tragic events that shook Mumbai last Wednesday would have interrupted all that noise. You would be wrong. In fact, on Wednesday night, none of the networks cancelled their very important programming—like Private Practice and Law & Order—to deliver breaking news (at that point, we knew about the hostage situation and 80 people had been declared dead), though they did occasionally put news tickers on the bottom of the screen about terror warnings in New York and Boston. The next day, the Macy's Day Parade and National Dog Show coverage droned on without a hitch. Cable news, of course, covered the attacks, and we guess the networks assumed that everyone in the world has cable, but Media Farm feels that Wolf Blitzer should pay us to watch him, not vice versa.

OK, so let's look at print, that dying medium that everyone likes to shit all over. In spite of the fact that the Boston Globe's newsroom is rapidly deflating, it still considers itself an international paper, and had front page coverage of the Mumbai attacks from Thursday through Saturday. So did the New York Times. Good for you, dailies. Gold star.

But the papers' splashing the front page with photos of the Taj burning doesn't necessarily mean those are the stories the literate public reads. In fact, if you look at the Globe's most emailed stories for this past week, the popular articles were overwhelmingly asinine. In first place, with 1,049 recommendations, was "Facebook Broke My Heart," a "news" story in which several people with absolutely no shame talked about being cheated on, stalking exes and "poking" anything even though they're in committed relationships. Basically, it told us everything we already knew about Facebook (that it brings people's assy behavioral flaws to an online medium), but found suckers who would admit to being naïve, voyeuristic and stupid. After that came an article on a study that found heart disease might be linked to bad bosses. Then stories on the SAT not being as important to college admission as it used to be, rats sniffing out bombs and 25 things to do in Boston for under $25 ... all of these came before the headlining story on boston.com on Wednesday when the Mumbai attacks began. Not only did the Mumbai story come in sixth place during an incredibly slow news week, the stupid Facebook story was emailed twice as many times (1,049 times, compared to 495).

OK, well, the Globe is kind of a local paper, right? So what about a paper with a more widely recognized international desk, like the Times?

The top-ranking emailed stories for the Times were an op-ed piece about why we should be angry about the Citibank bailout by someone—anyone—who isn't Maureen Dowd (that fact alone might account for the high traffic). The second most-emailed story was about an evangelical TV host who preached from a giant bed with a paisley cover (isn't that the devil's pattern?) about why married couples should engage in a week of "congregational copulation." Really:

"Today we're beginning this sexperiment, seven days of sex," he said, with his characteristic mix of humor, showmanship and Scripture. "How to move from whining about the economy to whoopee!"

And then there was the fucked-up story about Black Friday shoppers trampling a Wal-Mart employee to death.

"When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, 'I've been on line since yesterday morning,' " Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. "They kept shopping."

Because, c'mon, priorities! Speaking of priorities, this story ranked below a review of the new Blackberry, but above anything on Mumbai.

Why didn't the Mumbai attacks merit more attention from us readers? The same reason there were profiles of Americans like the rabbi from Brooklyn and the Virginian father and daughter, and relatively nothing on the estimated 158 Indians killed (out of a total of about 180 fatalities) ... because we're constantly looking for ourselves in everything we consume, and Americans can't identify with hand grenades and burning hotel rooms like we relate to internet stalking and Black Friday.