6 Shady Ways The Media Makes Millennials Look Like Idiots

Ah, college. It's that cherished time in a young person's life when they can live in the same hoodie for four to eight years, and plunk down $150,000 for the privilege of napping through a communications class. So when a story made its way around the Internet a while back about a Texas A&M University professor failing an entire class as a form of "tough love," it made total sense. Good on that rough-and-tumble Texan for showing those damn millennials what the world is really like.

One headline even went so far as to question, "Is This A Millennials Problem?" but forgot to include the answer, which is a resounding "Ha, no." The class was fine, but the professor was nutty, and not in an Eddie-Murphy-in-a-Fat-Suit way.

See, what the stories neglected to mention was that this professor was in the middle of a mid-semester meltdown. Nobody can fail until after finals, when they're safe at home and away from those mean ol' professors. They also left out the part where he basically said "You've failed!" as a sort of middle finger to everyone around him. After being denied the opportunity to teach only the best students at the school, the prof started mentally choreographing an "I Quit!" tap number (we assume) and straight-up got the fuck out of Dodge.

The professor sent an email to administrators letting them know the demonic students were "your problem now." But the real problem they had was already solved; by the time he'd let loose on his class, he'd left his position.

University officials shrugged off their former colleague's vanishing. They reiterated that no student had in fact failed, because that's not even possible at that stage in the semester. The students were left utterly confused by their collective grade, which either vindicates or condemns the nutty professor's attempted decision.

The twist they all failed to mention was that the pair were not down on their luck one iota, and that the toilet scrubbing was an integral part of their globetrotting. Nothing had gone wrong in the slightest. In truth, everything had gone exactly to plan, poop and all. The headlines are acting as if this is some kind of unexpected failure on the part of irresponsible millennials who wanted to travel. Only Uproxx looked into it and realized that scrubbing toilets was part of their plan.

No, it wasn't some kind of weird fetish, either. The couple in question booked their trip through Work Away, a program that sets travelers up with food and lodging in exchange for performing volunteer work while they stay. In addition to cleaning toilets, they did other things -- like washing dishes and cooking for other people -- to, get this, earn their keep.

One of the travelers, who wrote the original blog post which alerted the Internet to their adventures, said that they weren't even bothered by the scrubbing. It was rewarding, and taught the pair about humility. Inadvertently, it also taught them that the Internet is still a young child who stops listening to the details once they hear "poo."

The amount of selfie-induced injuries prompted a couple of tabloids, USA Today, and Slate to inform us that more people are being killed by posing than by shark attacks. This is absolutely ridiculous. If death by selfie were turned into a movie, it'd probably be named Buttons instead of Jaws, which sounds more like a movie about a boy and his dog thwarting a playground bully.

For starters, a shark is a direct cause of death. The shark ate the person, and the person died. If someone tripped over their cat in the kitchen and landed on a knife, we would not say that they were killed by their cat. Selfies fall more in line with the latter situation. The selfie didn't kill the person; the general situation did.

While we hate to get too technical, and people have definitely been killed and/or maimed taking selfies, we're getting out of hand here. Recently, a man took a selfie at the Taj Mahal, one of the Selfie Wonders of the World. During the shot, he fell down some stairs and died. The media decided to make this a story in which he was killed by his selfie, but conveniently left out the fact that the true cause of death was a heart attack.

We wish there were a happy ending to that, but all we can think of is that at least he died in a tomb.

All across the web, from Fox News to Yahoo, it's being reported that some ditzy millennial named Kim managed to blow the $90,000 that her grandparents had saved up for her, and then -- get this -- she had the audacity to point the finger at her parents for not helping her budget. How entitled she must be to expect lessons in responsibility from the people responsible for raising her.

What the headlines (which is apparently all millennials read, due to their low attention spans) neglected to mention was that Kim was a college senior who had spent the $90,000 over the course of the past three years on tuition. When it came time to write the final checks, she was about $20,000 short.

Granted, Kim admits that she took a trip abroad (she claims as part of an educational program) and purchased clothes and other such things with the money, but it's important to remember that this is $90,000 over the course of three years. Since tuition and living expenses can range from $20,000 to $50,000 a year, it's not totally unreasonable to believe that $30,000 per year was a tight budget.

What's unreasonable was that she was reluctant to take part-time jobs or loans to make up that difference, claiming that it would be embarrassing. Dammit Kim, we were trying to take your side here.

The Atlantic eventually published an update with the real facts, which showed that Gen-X'ers are the worst at home ownership. Think about that the next time a Baby Boomer tells those damn kids to get off their lawn.

The thing is, it's probably not true at all. The way people meet might be changing, but the way they transmit their gross goopy genital germs hasn't. This didn't stop Vice, The Daily Mail (missed you guys!), and Yahoo! from inserting their own ... dammit. They gave us the wrong information.

The closest they got to real facts was some people they interviewed indicating that they met their partners through social media. Social media was only one (completely anecdotal) avenue through which relationships were formed (rather than destroyed). "Experts" are "claiming" that there's a link here, but none are studying, measuring, and/or quantifying data, which is what experts are for.

They conveniently left out the fact that there are far more accurate reasons, such as unprotected sex, promiscuity, and having sex while intoxicated. All the legitimate data indicates is rising cases of STDs -- specifically gonorrhea, syphilis, and HIV. There's a lot of casual sex, but not even a halfhearted attempt at a fling has been documented between dating apps and infections. All we really know is that we need to pay better attention to what kinds of things we're letting get viral.

If you're interested in the real reason STDs are on the rise, you'll find it from @M_Hossey on Twitter. Wear a glove. Or two.

Honestly, there's no point in trusting the media. You can see us chronicle all of its filthiness in our ongoing B.S. News series. There's no real right place to start, so you can check out 7 B.S. News Stories That Fooled Your Facebook Friends or 8 B.S. News Stories That Fooled Your Friends.

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