This week we read one of the most insightful and brutally honest accounts of the state of journalism and the sad and inevitable direction in which it’s going. It took our breath away. The fact that it was a fake story posted by the fake news site The Onion is beside the point.
“Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning” is a fictional opinion piece claiming to be penned by Meredith Artley, managing editor of CNN.com. In it she explains why a once hallowed institution that many people turn to for top-notch news deemed Cyrus’s skimpy outfit, twerk-filled dance moves and aggressively sexual performance at Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards more important and pressing than “the hundreds of thousands of people dying in Syria, those suffering from the current unrest in Egypt, or, hell, even people who just wanted to read about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech.”
The reason, according to the fake Meredith Artley, is pretty simple. “It was an attempt to get you to click on CNN.com so that we could drive up our web traffic, which in turn would allow us to increase our advertising revenue.”
She goes further, explaining how nothing about the Cyrus story was remotely important or related to “the idea that journalism itself can be a force for positive change in the world.” It was merely a blatantly crass attempt, and a hugely successful one at that, to get more readers clicking, perusing, ogling through its slideshows and celebrity-fuelled info-tainment. “All you are to us, and all you will ever be to us, are eyeballs. The more eyeballs on our content, the more cash we can ask for. Period.”
Bringing it all home, fake Artley then implicates the reader as a willing accomplice in the media’s race to the bottom. “You want to know how many more page views the Miley Cyrus thing got than our article on the wildfires ravaging Yosemite? Like 6 gazillion more. That’s on you, not us.”
All in all, it’s a superb piece of satire that you and your weary eyeballs would be wise to check out.
Not only that, it really made us stop and reflect as we clicked through the Vancouver Sun’s online photo gallery of the recent “Topless Walk in Vancouver” event. Thank you, Onion.
