aving little to do one weekend, I decided to compare the outlook of several websites
that I often visit. I counted the number of stories on selected topics on their main
page on a typical day. Here are the results of my unscientific study:
| Website | Racism | Sexism | Cute Animals | Global Warming | Celebrities |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Science Mag. | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| Nature | 0 | 0 | 2* | 6 | 0 |
| Guardian | 12 | 7 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Daily Mail | 13 | 4 | 6** | 0 | 262 |
| Fox News | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| Breitbart | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
** Bigfoot classified as animal
The sites listed are ones I consider to contain actual news (I omitted sites like CBS and New York Times, which I consider to be mainly party mouthpieces).
Now, I don't suppose many people would be surprised by these results. But they raise the question: why is there such a discrepancy in their decisions about what is newsworthy? In the most recent Guardian, 19 stories were about racism or sexism, while news sites like Fox and Breitbart were tied with Science with only three—6 times lower. The Daily Mail had as many as the Guardian, but they were vastly outnumbered by stories about celebrities.
Hillary Clinton named Bigfoot as her running mate in 2008.
I'm not sure why movie stars have such an appeal to Daily Mail readers, but at least they have the virtue of being physically real. Whether the stories correspond to something that really happened is beside the point. Editors push their ideology not just by inserting their opinions into news stories, but by deciding what is worth reporting. This means that even if every story on their site were true, they are still falsifying the news.
The question is, why? Do the editors just have bad judgment or do they have some ulterior motive? Either way, readers are justified in refusing to believe anything they write.
Ideology is a substitute for thinking, so it makes people predictable. For example, I used to skip any article that was accompanied by a picture of a dog or a panda bear or any other cute animal, mainly because I have a strong gag reflex.
All this tribal poo-throwing leaves me more time to work on my blog, but it also means if, due to some unforeseen conjunction of circumstances, the fate of the planet were to depend on a man, a woman, a white person, a black person, a panda bear, or a bigfoot, I wouldn't hear about it until it was too late.
That fits in well with my worldview, which is to be as negative as possible. If something that's not terrible happens I'm always pleasantly surprised. If something that is terrible happens, I am also pleasantly surprised because it means I was right.
But as for whether anything in the news corresponds to anything that actually happened, it's impossible to say. You'd need an accurate source of news for that.
