May 02, 2005

• /confused
• Yeah, what exactly are you talking about, bernockle?
• a national news trend? maybe, but i'd hardly count one "OMG i faked finding a finger in my food" (the wendy's story got national attention, but no one tried to verify that a digit was missing from any employees beforehand) and then a subsequent "i found a finger in ice cream, from the same shop where an employee had a finger cut off and reported it to the manager" story reported on a wilmington, CT local TV station as a national trend. it's just two food and finger related news items. when we get three or more in national papers/TV , i'll call it a trend.
• WECT wilmington is hardly a national news outlet. but, yes, this is local news. and they are reporting it as such.
• While my point may not be important, I think that it may have been misunderstood. The news spends a lot of time on stories that are not news. The Wendy's story might have been newsworthy if it had been true. No one investigated. However, people got to be on national television about it. I am suggesting that perhaps this ice cream incident was done intentionally with the hope that the person would get some national television time. Reality shows have demonstrated that many people will do absolutely anything to be on television. Reporting false leads (or even true stories) like the Wendy's story only serves to give the perpetrators the national exposure they want and to give inspiration to would-be copycats. Different but related are the attractive white female who is a victim/suspect in a crime. Our media makes it a huge story. How many people called off weddings this past week? How many people were kidnapped? How many were murdered? Do you think anyone black called off their wedding this weekend? I think that it is an important question to ask why the media chooses its stories. I think it is important to look at the consequences (more tax dollars spent on attractive white female cases than any other, copycats, etc.) of running such stories. Again, they may not be interesting points I raise, but it seemed to me that they were not coming across clearly from the few comments I read.
• I lived in Wilmington for 13 years. This story would have been featured in the local news coverage regardless of the Wendy's incident. [And I might add that Kohl's has some mighty-fine ice cream!]. I highly doubt that this story was concocted in effort to ride the coattails of the "finger-in-chili" story, rather it seems quite innocent. I do believe that the U.S. media in particular focuses too much on irrelevant matters, but I tend to believe that this is a reflection of the general public's demand; biased or not.
• This is a story that I wondered about. It's no doubt interesting to the people immediately involved, but is it news?
• FUCK YOU WECT! LET ME GO BACK! Stupid fucking page.
• Hunh. I guess I didn't know Cape Fear was a real place... You learn something new every day.
• these are all called "human interest stories," or, "talkers." it's just weird stuff that happens that people like to talk about. i know my friends were buzzing about the runaway bride just because it's such an extreme reaction to cold feet. the reason why it seems like media outlets are spending so much time on these things is because with the advent of the 24-hour news channel, they need to fill all that time. that's why on saturday CNN was talking to marriage counselors and psychologists and criminal profilers about a woman who freaked out, cut her hair and bolted before her massive nuptials. it's called "feeding the beast." the news networks need to fill all that time. and filling it with important and heavy news isn't going to earn them viewers. print media isn't usually as guilty. the washpost played the runaway bride on A13.
• Runaway Bride still getting attention...
• see? it's just a freaky, interesting story. not all stories have to be earth-shattering or history-making. i myself write a lot of the former.
• "Miss Wilbanks was definitely a person in crisis." But to bernockle's point (i think) perhaps its the true overabundance of "human interest stories" that elbow out any serious discussion. Not that local news even pretends to have any. Except maybe the weather. They're damned serious about the weather, boy.
• yup, that's TV for you. here's an excerpt from howard kurtz's (washpost media critic) online chat today: Falls Church, Va.: I see an increasing media disconnect between what dominates cable TV news stories and what I read in The Washington Post newspaper. For instance, the "runaway bride" story was big news over the past weekend, yet I found not one article about it in the A section of The Post this morning. So, my question is: Does The Post genuinely think that this is not actually news worth reporting, or is The Post trying to snub the cable networks by implying that the cable stories are just trashy tabloid stuff that The Post won't stoop to covering? Or, are both of these motives at work? The disconnect is that I repeatedly see news stories on TV at night and then no continuation of coverage by The Post the next day. Thank you. Howard Kurtz: It's called news judgment. Actually, The Post had an article yesterday on the runaway bride. But the amount of cable overcoverage over the weekend about an unknown woman who got cold feet about her wedding was almost beyond belief--especially when we learned that she had not disappeared and had lied about being kidnapped. Again today, it's all over cable and the morning shows. This is your basic non-story that was badly hyped by networks thinking that maybe they had found the next Laci Peterson case.
• And I would point out that the Laci Peterson case would not be the Lacy Peterson case if she was two of the following three: poor, black, or unattractive.
• I think Howard Kurtz is a sanctimonious twit. This is not a "non-story" except in his own high-minded imagination; he wishes people weren't interested in this stuff and wanted to spend their time thinking about global warming and nuclear arms control and gerrymandering of congressional districts and all the stuff he and fellow policy wonks thinks we should be talking about, so he pretends it's just the evil news media that force it on us. Bullshit. People always have been interested in News of the Weird and always will be. In 415 BC Athenians woke up to discover somebody had knocked the dicks off the herms outside their houses, and the word on the street was that it was Alcibiades. Did people ignore this lurid incident and concentrate on the practical details of the upcoming Sicilian Expedition? No, all they wanted to talk about was the herms. It's human nature; you can deplore it all you want, but you can't blame the news media for it -- they're just giving us what we want. When my wife told me about the runaway bride story, I was fascinated and wanted to know more about it; this is true of everyone I know. If anyone reading this is so high-minded you don't care about such things, good for you, you might want to apply to the Institute of Advanced Study, but don't pretend that you're representative of humanity at large, 'cause you ain't.
• but languagehat, how do you really feel?
• I disagree wholeheartedly with the hat. I think that the responsibility of the news media at the level of cnn and anything else that calls itself "news" is to tell us about the things that we need to know about, not about the things that we want to know about. Things that we want to know about are entertainment news. They have traditionally been kept under various headings. No matter how much I may care about a sports team, I should have to turn to the sports section to read about them. If I want to know about the new Star Wars movie, then I should read the entertainment section. Perhaps that should be re-named the "Hollywood" section. And there is nothing wrong with having a "News of the Weird," or "Life" section, or anything else that could contain the runaway bride story. There is nothing wrong with you or anyone else being interested in whatever kind of story you want. But when the "Runaway Bride" headline can be found in the same place that "Ukraine Finds Election Fraud," "10,000 Die in Earthquate," or "Israel Signs Treaty" can be found, then it suggests that they have the same importance. They do not. And again, I ask whether the black runaway bride from the ghetto who had a reception planned in a relative's backyard would register as a blip on the radar of news reports. Yes, people want to hear about the runaway bride, but they should hear about it through sources that are designated to be "entertainment news" instead of through sources which claim to be presenting relevant, meaningful news. If the content of news is now to truly be defined as stories that people want to hear about, then the day is not far off when we will all be longing for FoxNews.
• Ah, yes. Media IS the gateway. Enter in, and dance down the road to hell.
• And now it is a national story on the front page of cnn. Finger Found in Custard in Wilmington
• bern, again, it's because CNN is a 24-hour news and cable operation, so they grab at ANYTHING that is remotely news. the finger and the bride both belong in the "man bites dog" category. it's the old axiom, "if a dog bites a man, it's not news; if a man bites a dog, it is." you're fortunate to live in this era, because YOU as a news consumer have LOTS of other news outlets. think CNN and other channels are too entertainment oriented? fine, simply don't watch it. turn on the NewsHour on PBS. i sincerely doubt it mentioned either the finger or the bride, and it has extended analyses of world and national issue. it's lighter fare leans toward thoughtful yet humorous pieces. it irks me as a reporter for a top-notch north american wire service when people say, "the media are so trashy!" nooooo, not newhouse news. not knight ridder. there are PLENTY other quality outlets available free to you -- find them and use them!! (meanwhile, FYI, three national reporters sitting next to me at this moment in the bureau are discussing... the runaway bride. kid you not.)
• bernockle, you do bring up some interesting points, but alas, SideDish hit it on the nail. If you don't like the type of news coverage a particular media outlet is pushing on its main pages, then don't frequent that source. Let the "masses" have their FoxNews and eat it too...
• I ask whether the black runaway bride from the ghetto who had a reception planned in a relative's backyard would register as a blip on the radar of news reports. No, it wouldn't. However, I think the race of the couple isn't as much of a determining factor in the story's newsworthiness as much as the rich/poor angle. Part of the allure of this story is the fact that the wedding was a 600-person affair and the bride & groom are fairly well off. That being said, I wasn't particularly interested in the story. Rich, poor, black, white, whatever. I just don't really care. And another thing: What bothers me about some of these stories is that the media certain news outlets don't know when to stop. For example, one of today's headlines is: "Father Tells Jilted Groom to Go Slowly". Ooh. Big news there... And SideDish was spot on.
• Goverment secretly funds Most popular media. They Sway the masses with fear. And feed them trivia. The masses vote . The pushed agenda. Freedom?
• My favorite article on the new finger. workplace statistics show that the chance of a body part winding up in food is extremely small.
• Now what?!
• The story continues to grow... and grow... Greed rears it's ugly head! Kolh's response If someone kept my bloody fingertip in their freezer, I'd be tossing maltov-cocktails through their front windows!!
• Sounds like a waste of good malt to me. Why not just fill the bottle with petrol?
• if anyone is still interested, this is an interview with a CNN bigwig re: whether the network overcovered the whole runaway bride story. excerpt: Is the lesson here that cable news simply operates at a level of inertia and entropy that no one can change, that you throw blanket coverage at a story that really doesn't merit it?
• toon
• Oh my God! A young, attractive, white girl is the potential victim/perpetrator of a crime! We had better exhaust all of our resources to help the new pretty white girl!
• Couple jailed for Wendy's finger scam
• Note: sugarmilktea's not been here for over a month. To the best of my knowledge, there's no connection between this and the Wendy's case.
• Where is that rascal?
• Remember Rowan & Martin's "Fickle Finger of Fate Award?"
• *rides tricycle while wearing raincoat* *falls over*
• Who stole my buppy?
• *bets his bippy*
• Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls I loved that stupid show