Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Ripped from the Headlines...

I went on a news blackout for a couple weeks. Watching the market tumble with a substantial chunk of 11 years of my work efforts was causing me to twitch.

But now that we are on the uptick again, I have gotten back into my ritual of skimming headlines and reading the news. I go to a few different sites to try to balance the bias. Here is my order over my morning coffee:

1. Washington Post.com - Tho I keep trying to boycott it, it IS my local newspaper so I skim the headlines. And keep a tally of the number of critical Obama articles. So far, still zero.
2. CNN.com - I dunno where to get an unbiased view but I have convinced myself I will get a good range of headlines and news here so I read this for the "real news"
3. Foxnews.com - Sweet, sweet admitted bias. I love it. Its like therapy and the inflamatory headlines make me giggle.

BUT today I noticed a disturbing trend. A large majority of the headlines looked like they were from the Onion but they WERE REAL NEWS. ALL IN ONE DAY.

Here they are in no particular order of how far they made my coffee come out my nose. I didn't make ANY of these up and they are from TODAY only. From the traditional media outlets websites. In case you were wondering, YES, the end is near.

1. Family 'Too Fat to Work' Collects Annual $30G...
2. Shoe camera used to watch naked women
3. Mom Helping Son With Down Syndrome Lose Virginity
4. 'Violent' Chimp Out of Control, Victim's Family Says
5. Report: Airlines Lose 40 Million Bags
Me: This isn't particularly funny except when I realized 20million of those bags were mine
6. Magnetic Fields From Power Lines Disorient Cows
7. Bob Dylan's toilet smell blows in the wind
8. Amish farmer gets jail in outhouse dispute
9. Tough to stop: Teams that score end up on top
Me: Thanks, Captain Obvious.
10. Man stuffed with corned beef wins $5k
11. Grassley Accuses AIG of Sucking 'Tit' of Taxpayer
12. Florida Man Wearing 'I Heart My Marriage' Shirt Arrested for Allegedly Choking Wife

After I reviewed the main news sites, I realized that FoxNews and CNN had the most ridiculous headlines, MSNBC was slightly behind them, CBS was pretty normal and ABC News didn't have anything silly. So I guess I need to revise my reading habits and maybe stick with stodgy old ABC and CBS.

Oddly enough, comedy central.com didn't have any headlines...O wait, Jon Stewart just THINKS he is a real news guy now...

1 comment:

  1. carm, forget the regular news, those 10 headlines make me want to go buy a damn island somewhere and run the hell away. I mean, really?

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