Jimmy Wellington

This is what “journalists” at CNN look at every day.

While real journalists go out and “interview” people and “write things down,” today’s media sources have taken to commenting on existing material. Every April 1, one can expect to find hundreds of run-downs of “The Greatest April Fool’s Day Pranks of All Time!” Here at The Fake News, we think this is bullshit. Journalism doesn’t get a day off. How hard is it to just compile a list of things from the internet and add a few comments?

To bring attention to this unacceptable practice, here are a few of the round-ups making the rounds this year.

1. The Vancouver Sun – The Sun is cheating even more than usual. All they have done is provide a link to a pre-existing video listing the greatest April Fool’s Day pranks. Do some work!

2. Trendy Gamers – This site lists the top ten video game related pranks of all time. What they fail to mention is that this caveat places the overall ranking of these pranks down around 15,000-30,000 in the “overall pranks” rankings.

3. V101.9 FM – The now-standard “Why do original content, let’s just embed some YouTube clips in an article and go out drinking” technique.

4.


5. Random Perspective - You have to hand it to this guy. He was able to find pranks that nobody else is reporting.

Many news outlets have some sort of Person on the Street section in which common people are asked to share their opinion about current events. In keeping with the current move towards journalistic laziness, The Fake News introduces a new segment that eliminates the need to leave the office. Every week we will ask a cross-section of society to tweet their opinion. Earlier this week, we asked for their thoughts on the debt ceiling crisis.

Many news outlets have some sort of Person on the Street section in which common people are asked to share their opinion about current events. In keeping with the current move towards journalistic laziness, The Fake News introduces a new segment that eliminates the need to leave the office. Every week we will ask a cross-section of society to tweet their opinion. Today, we asked for their thoughts on Father’s Day

Is Petra Nemcova ok?

As Joel Chillner watched a Youtube video of an enormous wave of water inundating Japanese farmland, he vowed that he would do something to help. A minute later, he sat back in his chair, looking in satisfaction at his new Facebook status, in which he said the tsunami “totally sucks” and he “really really REALLY hopes those people are ok, or at least know how to surf.”

Chillner is like many Americans who see disasters unfolding around the world and feel helpless. What can he do from so far away?

Fortunately, the internet has made it much easier for people like Chillner to do something to help people in need, or at least feel like they have done something to help people in need.

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At years end, everyone and their brother (and their sister in non-Islamic countries) write some kind of top ten list. To maintain that tradition, I decided to write a year-end top ten list. Rather than counting down my top ten movies or top ten varieties of cheese, here is my list of ten things that really sucked this year.

Facebook has allowed people to reconnect with people with whom they have lost contact over the years. In some cases, it only takes a day or two to remember why we lost contact with them. While Facebook is a social networking tool with great potential, it also has a tremendous capacity to annoy. Here are some Facebook behaviors that your friends find annoying, even if they won’t tell you. If you do these things, you’re likely not a bad person, but you are unnecessarily annoying people.

It’s Facebook, not YourKidBook. We realize that being a parent is something new and exciting for everyone. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being happy and proud of your children, in fact, it’s great that you care so much about them. However, remember that you feel that way because they’re your children. Do you find yourself thinking, “If only my friends would tell me all about their kids in every Facebook status” or “I wish I got daily pictures of other people’s kids?” No. There’s a reason you don’t think that. Also, you’re not the first person to be pregnant. All that stuff you complain about? It’s happened to every pregnant person ever.

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In just over 200 years, humanity has progressed from the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Entitlement. We want everything and we want it now. Delayed gratification now means you have to wait 2 minutes for your free pirated movie to download. We as a society need to be constantly validated, both at the personal and professional level.

I certainly am not immune. Most mornings I log into Facebook and immediately look to the lower right hand corner. That’s right. The Red Badge of Narcissism. Surely someone must have been sufficiently amused by some silly comment I made to take the time to reply, validating my wit with a red square. I’m often disappointed when I find out that instead of writing and telling me how funny I am, they’ve merely clicked the “Like this” button, which is the Facebook equivalent of the IM “LOL,” which I would guess is only 1% of the time accompanied by actual audible laughter. 

Our online worth is now being measured by how many Twitter followers we have, although again this number is deceiving. I’m still fairly new to Twitter (I did not sign up for a long time soley because of how stupid I think the word “Tweet” is) and I’m learning that some people have a compulsion to follow as many people as they can, likely believing that the person will see that they have a new follower and return the favor - a reciprocal validationary event, as George Carlin would have sarcastically referred to it. 

Why is this happening? I’m not sure, although there seem to be a lot of societal forces working in concert. All I know is that I’m going to buy stock in replacement F5 keys.