Don't Read All About It
I've perused the most annoying article of last week so you don't have to.
I wasn’t sure what to do with the article I read yesterday. It was so awful and yet so necessary to call out for its non-newsworthy, totally slanted approach to something that does not even come close to being called journalism. But it has inspired me to create a weekly feature of the worst news article over the last seven days. (Talk about making lemonade out of lemons!)
The headline says it all: “Betty White’s Death Breaks Right Wing Hold On Facebook News Cycle.” I’m not even going to link to it because I don’t want you to bother reading it, but of course you can google it and read it if you’d like to torture yourself.
This is from Forbes. Go ahead and google Forbes and you’ll see the publication describes itself as “a global media company, focusing on business, investing, technology, entrepreneurship, leadership, and lifestyle.” Why Forbes is lowering itself to discuss the news cycle on Facebook is beyond me. Why it decided to bring Betty White into the conversation just makes me mad. What an insult to a phenomenal actress and animal rights activist, using her death to highlight what Forbes sees as the evil right wing news machine. (And this would be just as awful of an article if it denounced “the left wing Facebook news cycle.”)
More importantly, why is this even news? How is anyone’s knowledge broadened by this article?
Unless some media outlets can stop turning everything — even Betty White’s death — into a battle between left and right, we are in big trouble. And this just leaves me wondering, where have all the editors gone?