Headlines that Piss Me Off

I took journalism in high school, and I learned about what you're supposed to do and not do. The fact is that the media in this country has a lot of power to influence people, and they use that rather liberally by doing things on the "don't do" list. I'm sure that this is sometimes incompetence and not a desire to change people's beliefs, but sometimes it seems so blatant that it really annoys me. So, I decided to start writing down headlines that are, for one reason or another, stupid. Most of these come from cnn.com because that happens to be the page I read the most (mostly out of habit). Without further ado:

5/24/07 - "Try these 5 tricks to outsmart your toddler." Wow, if you need the internet to tell you how to be smarter than a 3-year old, then you are in serious trouble as a parent.

10/23/07 - "Rising seas threaten Bangkok." This was the headline on the main cnn.com page. When you get to the article, the headline reads "Rising seas, sinking land threaten Thai capital." When you actually read the article, you find that the sea is rising by 0.1 inches per year, and the land is sinking by 4 inches per year. This is, in fact, 40x as much. So maybe, just maybe, the rising seas essentially have nothing to do with Bangkok being in trouble. The fact that this headline was what it was either represents gross incompetence or gross bias. The fact is that many people just scan headlines or the first few lines of an article, and it's really important that they be representative of what the article actually has to say.

11/12/07 - "Deer jumps into Pittsburgh zoo's polar bear exhibit. Deer injured, euthanized; Bears Not Harmed." So let me get this straight. The meek 200-lb deer jumped into an enclosed area with two carnivorous, 1000 lb polar bears with teeth and claws, and the bears came out ok, huh? Did they interview the bears? Check to see if they had any aches and pains aftewards? I'm sure they were pissed they didn't get to eat the deer, as zookeepers managed to separate the deer from the polar bears in a misguided attempt to stop the inevitable (as Darwin rolled in his grave). Let this stupid animal get what's coming to it. Geez. Luckily the deer suffered some trauma (not nearly as much as it deserved) during the process, and had to be killed.

3/1/08 - "Woman loses 180 pounds, gains celebrity status." Ok, it's really not just this one. It seems like every other bloody week somebody loses a normal-sized adult human being's worth of weight and makes the front page of CNN. Where's the praise for the consciencious people who aren't 100% happy with their lives, but don't eat themselves stupid in the first place? "Man unhappy with job, marraige, maintains healthy weight anyway." Don't these people get enough self-satisfaction from being a third of their previous size? Do we really have to make them national heroes? I'm tired of it.

12/18/08 - "No good way to tell kids they have cancer" ... of course there's no good way to tell a child they have cancer! On anybody's list of things they don't want to hear, having cancer is gonna be way up at the top. There are, however, bad ways of telling your kid they have cancer - like telling them you have a suprise for them first, as the couple who are discussed in the article did. Shocker - having the kid expect something good, and then breaking the cancer news is a really stupid idea. This led them to conclude that there's no good way to do it. True, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have found a less godawful way of doing it. Can we keep people who do stupid things like this off the front page of CNN?

3/3/08 - "Michael Jackson to make announcement." I hate it when news organizations do this crap. They're telling me that there will be news in the future. How about you wait to tell me about the news until it actually happens. Maybe he'll decide he doesn't want to make the announcement. Then you've gone and gotten my hopes up for actual news in the future! Not only that, this isn't even really going to be news in the future. Does anyone really still care about Michael Jackson anyway? He went off the deep end quite a while ago now, and I stop paying attention to people when that happens.