Book Review: That's Not News, That's Fark

When I first saw Drew Curtis's book at the library, I knew just from the subtitle it was going to be a great book. The subtitle is How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News.

Curtis runs Fark.com, a site devoted to all the garbage the networks, newspapers, cable, and radio try to pass off as news. Now Curtis has put together a book categorizing this junk into lists ranging from "Fearmongering" to "The Out-of-Context Celebrity Quote" to "Equal Time for Nutjobs."

You don't have to get far into Fark before you start recognizing the stories. Remember those stories about how bacteria is going to kill us all? Or the runaway bride (my God, she's got a Wikipedia entry!)? Or Justice Scalia's rude gesture? Yep, those are all examples of the crap media parades for us as news.

It's easy to identify the junk. Every top 10 list qualifies as well as every natural disaster, even those that didn't quite live up to expectations. And let's not even start with the how to articles.

Walter Cronkite once stated that almost everything that appears on the nightly news isn't news, it's filler. He was right when he said it, and the news has only gotten worse since then.

What Curtis points out (in his very humorous way) is that real news could be boiled down to a (roughly) 5 minute broadcast. The problem is, of course, that the 24-hour news cycle has created a need for news whether that news is real, fake, manufactured, or "fake but accurate."

Fark is a fun read and makes me remember some of my funnier moments in journalism. In fact, reading Fark is a bit like sitting in a bar nursing a beer with Curtis (I'd find that entertaining), only without the beer and, well, the bar. Very few books make me laugh out loud or say, "Honey, listen to this," but Fark has both. I'd recommend Fark to any recovering journalist (like me) or anyone interested in news. Even if you didn't learn anything, you'd be entertained. Which is a little like junk news, eh?