Reviews for It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass off Crap as News

The average rating for It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass off Crap as News based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-11-28 00:00:00 Manny Rogers Right before I left New York a few years ago, I was anonymously sponsored for a TotalFark subscription. TotalFark is a sub-community of the news aggregator site, Fark, in which people pay $5 per month or are sponsored to enjoy a smaller posting community with extra viewing privileges. That's the most objective way I can define it, as since then it has changed my life dramatically. (I know, gross.) I mention TF because it is only through the random sponsorship of Anonymous that I saw an announcement for the NYC Fark party where I met Drew. We had a nice one-on-one discussion about his new book, which I just got around to reading now. Having a strong interest in how people consume different types of media, I remember liking the premise he laid out. But at the end of our talk, I was mostly thinking, I just got a one-hour summary of a book on media by the author himself. Now I don't have to read it. Sweet! Oh, how time and boredom make fools of us all. I won't say the book was a waste of time, since mine comes cheap these days. However, it regurgitated much of what you could just read on Fark with some clever commentary from the book author and site creator himself. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's obvious. At times, it was even a little informative, but every once in awhile, it kind of missed the mark. Funny: If my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle. I really liked this immature way of explaining a valid point. Obvious: Top 10 lists exist solely as commercials for the people who make them. Even when the publications explain the metrics used to arrive at their rankings (which is rare), they're still ridiculously biased. Informative: I was wondering why Florida had its own headline tag. That state has the absolute most WTF stories in the entire US. Without Florida, Fark might not have existed. Missed the Mark: He complains about people misinterpreting statistics, but in the same paragraph says 90 percent of any random group of people will be made up of dumbasses. I guess he could have mentioned that 82 percent of all statistics are completely made up, but I guess 67 percent of his readers already know that. One of my favorite chapters was "Equal Time for Nutjobs". I agree that the media gives them far too much airtime in the interest of seeming unbiased and attracting readers with sensationalism. Toward the end of the chapter, he openly invites the media to "stop making the 'where do we draw the line?' argument. Just make a judgment call already." Yes. THIS. To say this book is an all-out media bitch-fest is an understatement. It's full of clever criticisms, and I agree with them. I'm only giving the book three stars because he doesn't cover anything (aside from Fark-centric stuff) that you wouldn't hear in a college journalism class. Having participated in many discussions covering similar topics, I don't feel the book did much but reaffirm my hatred of journalism. It's okay though, because the book even has a section on the media's is self-loathing. As it should. We have too much space, too much "media", and not enough actual news. And yes, the journalism profession has become defined by laziness. This started happening before my lifetime, but I'm sure it wasn't always the case. The internet really brought things to a head, making it worse than ever. Toward the end of the book, Drew spends a few pages discussing how online advertising changed everything, and I would have liked to have seen more depth on that since it's less obvious than the rest of the book. To that end, Drew is not so different from the journalists he denounces. He's telling us stuff we already know and illustrating his points with summarized articles from an outside source and copypasta'ed quotes from Farkers. As the site got popular, someone probably told him there was money to be made if he authored a book. He may not have admitted that directly in our conversation a few years ago, but I like that he didn't claim to break any ground either. "Read it or don't read it. I don't really care" seemed to be his marketing message. It was a refreshing indifference for a book author, but a common sentiment among writers expected to churn out dozens of articles per week. I appreciate that he thanks Delta Airlines in the Acknowledgments section for delaying all of his flights so he would have time to write this book. I can say from experience Delta is to air travel what the National Enquirer is to journalism. So Drew hates the media AND Delta, and his writing is the result of sheer boredom. He's truly an everyman after my own heart. This book is neither full of win, nor full of fail. And before you tell me to DIAF or EABOD, just know that ceiling cat is watching me write this, and if you comment on this review, I will really be getting a kick out of your replies.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-08-21 00:00:00 Tiffany Pastula ★★★☆ for the introduction. On its own it would have made an interesting article, setting out a mildly humorous, yet fairly insightful, taxonomy of the sorts of stories mass media runs in the absence of any real news ("Media Fearmongering", "Unpaid Placement Masquerading as Actual Article", "Headline Contradicted by Actual Article", "Equal Time for Nutjobs", "The Out-of-Context Celebrity Comment", "Seasonal Articles", "Media Fatique", "Lesser Media Space Fillers"). The rest of the book, however, gets barely a single star. The examples of each type of story often aren't particularly interesting or enlightening (and the author can't seem to decide whether they should be funny or not), and the inclusion of seemingly random comments from Fark users about each story is so far beyond needless than even quickly skipping over them all without reading them still made me feel more stupid by association.