4

News Reports Need to Be Very Simple Stories

Soooooo "news" is really just topical entertainment these days, right? I'm not trying to be sardonic or cynical; that's really what it is. If you read Cracked regularly, you know that David Bell has been chronicling B.S. news stories that go viral -- and those archives aren't just a list of details that some people got wrong or odd tabloid pieces; it's every hot issue, every month, from every source. The New York Daily News is a frequent peddler of B.S., and they've won multiple Pulitzers. Somewhere between the "good old days" and whatever right now is, the news stopped being about public duty and informing people and became about telling the most interesting story and harvesting the most clicks. Because clicks are cash, and cash buys sports cars. So to get those clicks, the news can't just tell you what's happening -- they have to tell a story. This isn't just sensationalism, this is building a narrative that's "based on a true story" the same way In the Heart of the Sea will be.

Warner Bros.
The working title was No Seriously, It Was This Big.

3

Each Story Is Every Story

Overall, people are reasonably sharp. When they're looking for patterns, they understand that anecdotal evidence doesn't mean anything, and that we need to talk about broad studies and statistics and -- wait, shit, didn't Mark Twain have something to say on the subject of statistics?

Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
"... about statistics."

With all due respect to whoever Twain was, isolated incidents are way more misleading than statistics. If you're going to lie to someone with scientific data, you have to manipulate it, or hide parts of it, or change the context. If you're going to mislead someone with an anecdote, all you have to do is ... tell them about it. Because our brains think single incidents matter more than broad trends. Impossibly, a story with a single strange story name seems a thousand times as "real" as a million real stories without names. It becomes how we remember history. That one name becomes a stand-in for everyone else with a similar experience.

What this means is that, according to our brains, there are no single incidents. Everything that happens is every other thing like it that has ever happened in history. We're never just arguing about whether one kid deserved to be killed in the street or one woman was lying about her assault; it's an argument about whether every kid deserves to be shot dead or every woman is lying about everything they've ever said. This is why last year, after a woman retracted her allegation that Conor Oberst (from the band Bright Eyes) had assaulted her, a big concern was that this would discredit future assault victims' testimonies. That's why after Rolling Stone retracted the UVA story everyone was worried that we'd use it as an excuse to stop believing rape allegations -- and everyone was right.

The Blaze
"This story proves all women are lying, just like Balloon Boy proved that children never go missing."

2

We Instinctively Judge Victims More Harshly

The thing we call "victim blaming" is sometimes more nuanced and subtle than someone just shouting, "It's your fault you got shot!" on national TV. A lot of times, victim blaming is just saying, "See, she could've done something different -- if I had been in that situation, there's no way I would've put up with that shit!" The problem is that we're really bad at telling if that's actually true.

Jose Luis Pelaez Inc/Blend Images/Getty Images
"Frodo is such a bitch. If I were on the cusp of Mount Doom, I'd have had no trouble throwing the ring in."

People consistently think that it's easier to stand up for yourself than it actually is. When you take your car to get fixed, you'll probably find it impossible to question the greasy genius when he tells you that your auto-reticulator has been de-exhaustified -- but if your friend comes back from the mechanic with the same story, you can't help but get in his face and say, "C'mon, the guy was obviously lying; why didn't you just tell that guy to back off and that you weren't going to take his shit? That's what I would have done!"

This becomes a real problem when that person hears a detailed story about someone being harassed or victimized, because they assume that they would've handled the situation better. Another study found that when women watch a video of another woman being sexually harassed during a job interview, they're overwhelmingly likely to assign her some blame for putting up with it.

Digital Vision./Photodisc/Getty Images
"See, the problem is what she's wearing; we can all tell that she's a woman."

1

We're All Addicted to Punishing People

The problem with victim blaming isn't just that we're punishing the wrong person, it's that it stimulates our obsession with finding someone to punish, because punishment is the only way we know how to solve problems. If you don't believe me, look at any movie or story ever: it ends in cathartic punishment. The shark in Jaws explodes. The Aliens in Independence Day explode. Humbert Humbert in Lolita explodes. The Death Star in Star Wars explodes.

20th Century Fox
Pictured: Every single one of those things.

And it's not just pop culture -- even though cruel and unusual punishment is unconstitutional, and even though prisons are known as "correctional facilities" instead of "choke-slam dungeons," people still think that we need to hurt the people that we lock up. Criminals need to go through a cathartically agonizing experience to "make things right."

But that makes no sense, right? The point isn't to hurt people who hurt someone else, the point should be to stop hurt from happening ... right? What does society gain from one individual's suffering, especially if we discover that it doesn't stop future suffering? If prisons are any indication, the fact that something is totally useless doesn't mean we shouldn't stick with it, forever. Makes me wonder if we're less interested in stopping crime than we are in getting that heroin-like high that comes from watching other people suffer. We're just chasing that catharsis of seeing someone pay.

My point is this: whenever someone uses the phrase "the ends justify the means," it's always -- always -- used to justify the act of doing something fucked-up to another person. The "ends" could be any political, personal, or religious cause in human history, but the "means" is always "being a dick." Makes me feel like people are less interested in any of those causes and more interested in being dicks to each other. Well, what if your ends are "stop people from being dicks"? What means does that end justify? Seriously, I'm asking. Because that would be just the best.

JF Sargent is an editor and columnist for Cracked. You can find him on Twitter and Facebook by clicking on the blue words.

For more from Sarge, check out 5 Common Argument Tactics That Need to Die. And then check out Everyday Life If One Crime Were Suddenly Legal.

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