FARK IS WHAT FILLS SPACE WHEN MASS MEDIA RUNS OUT OF NEWS.
It's not news, it's Fark. Fark is supposed to look like
news... but it's not news.
There is an ancient (supposed) Chinese curse: "May you live
in interesting times." Let's face it, interesting times suck.
Whenever Mass Media is really fulfilling its intended purpose,
generally something bad is going on. Wars, blown elections, bad
weather, you name it—when people need to know something, it's
probably because it's likely to kill them. We'd be much better off
living in non-interesting times.
Not living in interesting times presents a problem for Mass
Media, however. This has been further compounded by the
advent of twenty-four-hour news channels and the Internet as a
news source. Back in the days when TV news concentrated most
of its resources on a half-hour block of news, finding material to
fill the time slot wasn't difficult. Nowadays cable news networks
have to scramble to have something to talk about twenty-four
hours a day, even when nothing of import is going on. Sales
departments are still selling advertisements, after all. Mass Media
can't just run content made entirely of ads (with the possible exception of the Home Shopping Network). Something has to fill
the space.
Over the years Mass Media has developed several methods of
filling this space. No one teaches this in journalism school; odds
are Mass Media itself hasn't given much thought to the process.
It's a practice honed over the years by editors and publishers,
verbally passed down from one generation to the next. They're not
entirely aware they're doing it, although the media folks who read
advance copies of this manuscript all had the same reaction: "I've
been saying we should stop doing this for YEARS."
