28 March 2008

(Heart)Breaking News

Why do online news sources feel the need to put up a detailed headline every time some horribly messed up person commits an unthinkable atrocity against his or her child? I absolutely hate it. Just the information given in the headlines is terribly upsetting to me, and what good does it do to publicize them anyway? There should be a code or something: "Anyone with a morbid interest in yet another impossibly sickening example of man's inhumanity to man, click here."

A while back one of the National Review writers kept linking to this kind of story in the Corner. I emailed her every time she did it begging her to quit, and after a while she did (although she never responded to my emails). Seriously, what is the point? Don't we all know that people are no darn good? I used to just avoid the problematic site for a while when one of these headlines would go up and hope it would have cycled out by the time I went back, but they're getting increasingly harder to avoid. I'll say this for NPR, for all their irritating bias (and their charming blindness thereunto, which really is cute), I've never heard them report on one of these purely sensationalist horror stories.

1 comment:

Dawn said...

I know . . .

There's a little story about some chickens and a cat I think all major news sources should read. They aren't selling news, they're selling ideas, the jerks.