Gwyneth Paltrow and the Dumbing Down of the News Business

Back when I started working in the newspaper industry we’d tie our horses up to the office hitching post, put some whale oil in our lamps and print up a bunch of newspapers which would then be sold on street corners by a collection of Oliver Twist urchins yelling things like: “MADMAN STALKS THE STREETS OF LONDON!”

(Just kidding, it wasn’t nearly that exciting.)

But like any news organization we had to decide what news was worth covering, so being unsophisticated dumbbells we gave our readers the news we thought they needed to know.

Occasionally, we’d invite a group of readers to be part of a “focus group” and feed them coffee and donuts while asking them questions because we wanted to know what they liked and didn’t like and we really enjoyed having them lie directly to our faces. Turns out people don’t want to look like low-brow morons, so they might answer questions about what they read with answers that made them look good like:

“Yes, I particularly enjoyed the 12-part series on the long-term ramifications of the new tax code and no, I did not linger too long on the lingerie ads that people in the future will find appallingly sexist.”

We’d talk to maybe 12 people and let them tell us what news content to give the several hundred thousand readers who didn’t get invited to be part of the “focus group” because we didn’t have enough donuts.

Using that process – which was a big step up from reading palms, tea leaves and the entrails of animals – we could give the readers what they said they wanted.

And then we got the internet.

Now we didn’t have to hold focus groups and give them free donuts: we could actually see what stories readers clicked on and how long they read them (engagement time) and how far down the story they scrolled and it turned out, in reality, a lot of readers liked to read about goofy events that had absolutely nothing to do with them, which in the internet news business is known as “clickbait.”

Like:

• “Teacher arrested after whacking student on butt and legs with ruler, Florida cops say”

• “Florida man stuns onlookers with risky drawbridge stunt”

• “If something really moronic happens, there’s a good chance it happened in Florida”

OK, I made that last one up, but the first two are real and I found them while looking at the Kansas City Star and CNN websites for dumb stories that have absolutely no impact on most peoples’ lives and both stories took place in Florida. And when I thought about it, a lot of really dumb news involving alligators, meth labs and bad plastic surgery seems to originate in Our Nation’s Penis which might explain why the National Enquirer had its offices there — it saved on travel expenses.

In any case…

One of the things that gets readers’ attention is celebrity news, so you got to hear way too much about a collision on a ski slope which has absolutely nothing to do with you or your life and while you might ask what’s the harm in having some fluff mixed in with your hard news, the answer is these days you’re a lot more likely to have some hard news mixed in with your fluff.

Plus all the reporters and news organizations covering Gwyneth Paltrow aren’t covering stuff that actually matters, but these days the readers are in charge and the News Business is just giving the American Public what it wants.

But we used to be better than that.   

And now a completely self-serving rant about cartoons

It took me a while to figure out how cartoons went from being one of the most popular things in printed newspapers to being one of the least popular things on newspaper websites and while it’s only a theory, it’s a pretty good theory:

Change the way you measure something and you’ll change the results.

Ask a member of a focus group what he or she looks at when reading a newspaper and cartoons will do well because who won’t take a few seconds to read a cartoon caption on their way to finding out how much the Kansas City Royals lost by on Opening Day?

But put those same cartoons online and now someone has to click on them to see them – so you don’t get a lot of “drive-by” readers – and the engagement time also sucks because it only takes a few seconds to look at a cartoon, so while cartoonists were a big deal in print, we became less of a big deal online and now most newspapers have decided they can live without one. 

Donald Trump appears to have been born without whatever gene causes shame because he can get caught lying over and over – and they’re pretty obvious lies – and has no reluctance to repeat those lies or, if it’s a really special occasion, make up new ones.

After predicting “death & destruction” if he gets indicted – and he did – Trump held a rally in Waco, Texas (which has a bit of a history with Shit Getting Out of Hand When It Comes to Law Enforcement) and once again lied about winning the 2020 election.

According to the following fact-check article, Trump also lied about:

• The trade deficit with China

• Previous presidents and tariffs on Chinese goods

• The Border Wall

• Inflation

• Latin America and deportations

• Military equipment left to the Taliban

• Obama and Ukraine

• Michael Bloomberg’s campaign spending

• The Nord Stream 2 pipeline project

• The cost of an embassy move

Annnnd…

• Pitching a perfect game for the USA against the Japanese team in the World Baseball Classic and then, after getting shit-faced during the postgame celebration, flying to New York and making a hip-hop version of America the Beautiful with Jay-Z and Beyonce on backup vocals.

OK, I made that last one up, but if you’re gonna tell lies, try telling some cool ones and if you want to read more about the lies Donald Trump actually told, here you go:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/25/politics/trump-fact-check-waco-rally/index.html

A concerned politician whose name I didn’t write down said if Trump keeps it up, he’s going to get someone killed, but if you’ll check your scorecards, that’s already happened:

• During the Jan. 6^th riot a Trump supporter named Ashli Babbitt got shot by a Capitol policeman while attempting to crawl through a broken window leading to the Speaker’s Lobby outside the U.S. House of Representatives’ chamber.

• Trump supporter Ricky Shiffer died in a shootout with police after attempting to breach the FBI’s Cincinnati office after the FBI had the gall to search Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate for classified documents. 

Getting his supporters wound up to the point they attack the government and then get shot for their efforts, doesn’t seem to bother Donald Trump in the least and that’s no lie.

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/11/how-many-died-as-a-result-of-capitol-riot/

So the Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and to show they’re on top of things, both the House and the Senate have called hearings and while Congressional hearings might be entertaining if you have an extremely low I-Find-That-Entertaining Threshold (which is the best explanation I can come up with for TikTok) I thought it worth pointing out that Congress does not have a great track record when it comes to solving problems.

Speaking of which…

The Missouri Senate passed a bill banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports including private schools and colleges, which might make you wonder just how many transgender athletes there are in Missouri and while the Kansas City Star did not have an exact count, the article did say it was “only a small number.”

Which means the Star didn’t know the exact number and neither did I, so I looked elsewhere for an answer.

According to the following CNN article, about 50 of the roughly 200,000 athletes competing in women’s sports at the collegiate level are transgender, so do the math and that’s about one per state and since Missouri is often behind the curve we may have to share a transgender athlete with Kansas.

Nevertheless, some politicians are more than happy to solve a problem we don’t really have, possibly because solving problems we do have is much harder.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/22/sport/ncaa-lia-thomas-transgender-policy/index.html

There is a very believable theory that a whole bunch of political issues are used as distractions – school prayer, border walls, drag shows that nobody is being forced to watch – so we don’t ask highly inconvenient questions about the difficult issues politicians would rather not talk about.

A point to ponder

The same people who say homosexuality or dressing up like a woman (which are two entirely different things) or just about anything to do with LBGTQ lifestyle is abhorrent and repugnant, also seem to think it’s such an attractive lifestyle that any kid who sees a man dressed as a woman will immediately want to try it out for himself.

When I was a kid I saw Little Richard on TV and as I recall my main emotion was confusion, but seeing Little Richard did not make me want to get some eyeliner and a Diana Ross wig.

It made me want to learn to play boogie-woogie on piano.

I set this cartoon up in the form of a question because I hoped to get readers to think about whose rights are more important:

1. The rights of people who think guns should be easily available…

2. Or the rights of nine-year-olds to go to school and not get shot?

I posed it as a question, but unfortunately there actually is no question because we’ve made it pretty clear we’re going with the gun owners. If you think what people do is more important than what people say – and it is – it’s clear we’re going to say it’s a tragedy and something needs to be done and then do jackshit about it.

Marjorie Taylor Greene got into an argument with another politician whose name I’ve forgotten – probably because he’s not a famous nitwit – and took the position that our real problem is not having enough guns.

We have more guns per capita than any nation on Earth and guess who also has more mass shootings than any nation on Earth and the two facts do not seem unrelated.

I wrote about this at length in a previous post and here’s a link:

Baseball’s New Rules and Unintended Consequences

Just in case you don’t know, baseball has some new rules and it will take a while to see how they work out, but in the two games I watched the pitch clock seemed to do its job because the Twins-Royals game took two hours and 32 minutes and the White Sox-Astros game took two hours and 38 minutes.

Last season the average baseball game took three hours and six minutes and so far this year games are averaging two hours and 42 minutes.

As predicted, one of the teams – and right now I can’t remember if it was the White Sox, Astros Twins or Royals, but I think it was the Royals…an understandable state of confusion when your Irish coffee contains more Irish than coffee – got around the “no shifts” rule by bringing their right fielder close to the infield, which worked out brilliantly because the batter hit the ball right at the right fielder and I just looked up errors and I believe it was the Royals MJ Melendez.

Who, after catching the grounder then lost his grip on the ball (outfield gloves are bigger than infield gloves so grabbing the ball isn’t as easy) but dropped the ball on the transfer so the Royals didn’t get an out.

So yeah, bringing in your pull-side outfielder might be a brilliant move to beat the “no-shifts” rule unless your pull-side outfielder doesn’t have a lot of experience fielding grounders.

OK, that’s it for today so feel free to leave a comment telling me what you liked and didn’t like — but don’t expect free coffee and donuts.  

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/