Atrios writes:
It seems that every day is dominated by some fake news event - a school lockdown, a missing child, a truck accident, a workplace shooting - with a brief hour of television from another planet when they broadcast CNN International at noon.
It isn't that these stories aren't news at all, but they're local news stories. They're broadcast only because there's some sort of voyeuristic lure in them. This was brought home to me when the fake news story of the day was an armored car heist in Philadelphia. People were killed and it was certainly a valid local news story, but there was absolutely nothing about the story to make it have any national relevance at all.
But armored car heists are interesting, the sort of story on which a bored channel-flipper may let his remote rest. And that, after all, is CNN's highest priority: Not informing its viewers, but capturing a maximum share of television's total viewers. As George Saunders says in his essay "The Braindead Megaphone," asking the media to tell us the truth is not the same as asking the media to "tell us as much truth as you can, while still making money." The latter is what they're doing, and it's why interesting stories so often overwhem actual news.
