5

Teens Doing Stupid Things Aren't News (Or "Crazes," Or "Games," Or "Challenges")

As we've mentioned a ton on Cracked, one tried-and-true media method for siphoning the fear of the aged is to re-gift isolated incidents involving young people as massive "crazes" sweeping the planet like a monkey virus. For example, take a teen overdose, add the hashtag #ParacetamolChallenge, and ...

theguardian.com

mirror.co.uk

BAM! Sweet golden bullshit! It doesn't matter that this "Paracetamol Challenge" boils down to one overdose of an unnamed, possibly fictional schoolboy in Ireland, because no one is going to actually check (except that damn Snopes). Now behold the completely nonexistent "Game of 72" -- a case of The Daily Mail rebranding a single runaway teen story to make it more share-worthy.

mirror.co.uk

dailymail.co.uk

Let's do another one! Hey parents! Didja hear about this terrifying teenage hashtag craze called ...

thelocal.fr

4

Personal Anecdotes Turned Into Broad Social Issues Aren't News

At some point, every writer has been screwed by a business, landlord, or random jerk, and realized their only recourse was to whine about it on the Internet. In theory, this is great for a personal blog or social media post. But to reach a maximum audience, it seems that some are infusing larger social issues with their own personal woes, like journalism mad scientists. For example, there's no good reason this should have gotten 500,000 views:

millihelen.jezebel.com

According to this Jezebel article, one of their editors was refused a neck tattoo because the artist was sexist and thought she couldn't handle it ... as opposed to the easily Googlable fact that inking around someone's primary arteries is an extremely common request for tattoo artists to refuse. But instead of reasoning that out, the writer decided to go for the scorched earth approach and end on a slideshow mocking the artist's work on completely uninvolved strangers:

millihelen.jezebel.com

The artist in question later explained all of this for another site, which didn't stop Jezebel from adding zero corrections to the still-published complaint piece. After all, it's really just one person's word against the other -- raising the question as to what any part of this story accomplishes, besides satisfying the part of our brain that likes killing things with rocks. Same goes for this garbage:

vox.com

3

Random People's Embarrassing Small-Town Crimes Aren't News

Pretty much every respectable news organization can agree that cyberbullying sucks a big veiny D. Jezebel, for example, has published numerous articles about the dangers of shaming people over the Internet. As a writer for Cracked, I personally try to avoid mocking random civilian jerkfaces for that very reason. Which is why I'm not going to provide a link to this mean-spirited horsepiss of an article:

jezebel.com

Goddamn it, Jezebel. In case you're wondering, the choice to blur the tearful mugshot was mine, and not the site that apparently thought it was fun to make a young girl's stupid shoplifting crime a national chuckle farm for easy clicks. Because it's not like anyone else did stupid shit when they were 18.

deathandtaxesmag.com

2

Teen-Shaming Parents Aren't News

By design, adolescence is a time of emotional stupidity and painful self-awareness, something the rest of society finds annoying as shit -- second only to viral fame-humping parents who think shaming their kids on camera will somehow teach them a lesson. But if I had to feverishly stone one group over the other, I'd choose option three: the people willing to report it whenever some asshole disguises child abuse as adult retribution. Like this:

washingtonpost.com

Fuck that guy. Not because his technique didn't work to improve the kid's behavior, but rather because it did, making his proof of concept one more cobblestone on the shame-wagon trail. Here's another one the media ticker-taped to death:

opposingviews.com

Way to set an example, "no-nonsense dad"! What a brave, brave ...

news.com.au

1

One-Sided Accounts Against Organizations Aren't News

If you haven't already noticed, most of my manly unsheathed rage has to do with the media boiling someone's personal problems into a headline or meme and then hucking that bullshit into the viral gorge. And the biggest reason for this is that we'll never get the full story when we're coming at it with an already established villain and/or hero. For example: any time a helpless student or school employee gets in trouble for something innocent.

cnn.com

dailycaller.com

That kid had a history of physical harassment, but since it's not something the school was legally allowed to disclose, we only get the angry parents' totally objective side. Same with the lunch lady: the school says they can't legally disclose the reason she was fired, which happens a lot in educational establishments. Sometimes, we don't have the full story because (as difficult as it may be for our outrage-starved brains to comprehend) we're not fucking supposed to.

If you're wondering why I'm focusing on such small potatoes, it's because my brain is physically unable to withstand the full-scale version of this dirty fuckingness for long periods of time ...

gawker.com

That there is the now-infamous Gawker article publicly outing the CFO of a major company for being gay after a (conspiracy theory lunatic) prostitute blackmailed him for not helping with a landlord dispute. That means instead of the headline "Crazy Asshole Blackmails Man," they opted to act as an accomplice to the extortion of a man whose sexuality in no way affects anyone's life but the one they just ruined. Wrap your fucking skull passenger around that slice of journalistic nihilism the next time you consider clicking on another Gawker article. Seriously, as someone who researches the news on a daily basis, I'm telling you to stop reading Gawker right now. They're an insufferable garbage business that doesn't care about the news.

Don't look up the article I'm referring to.

You're totally Googling it right now, aren't you? Fuck.

Gawker eventually took down the article, much to the consternation of their staff, who responded with the least sympathetic protest ever mounted in the name of editorial integrity. But -- even after wide swathes of civilization decided they were assholes -- Gawker sure as shit raked in those schadenfreude clicks, thanks to an interminable series of followup articles (both in-house and by other outlets) detailing exactly how their website was falling into the ocean.

And that's the problem. In the end, the dirty little lie we're all telling ourselves is that the reactionary news we share on social media is anything besides self-indulgent. And the more we define what's "newsworthy" based off our dumbshit, primordial, saber-toothed-tiger-fearing emotional reactions instead of our reasoning skills, the more the news will desperately try to appeal to that impulsive side of us that can't help but to hit the "share" button. All I'm asking is that you think for a second before doing so.

Except for this. Please share this immediately and without question.

Thanks.

Dave has been researching the news for over two goddamn years. Send him condolences on Twitter.

Also check out 6 BS Medical Stories Your Friends Shared On Facebook and The 5 Weirdest Ways the Modern World Changed Human Behavior.