It’s as if the big corporate media is so desperate to create news, that it will grasp at anything to put ink on dead trees. This week, they continued to report that Tiger Woods and his wife were hanging out at some sex addiction clinic in Hattiesburg Miss., when in fact, the Hattiesburg American that “all the paparazzi have gone home.” If the paparazzi isn’t going to wait around, then it’s unlikely anybody is there.
And yet, the story of Tiger and Elin at the sex addiction clinic was top of the page at the Vancouver Sun. Huh? The paparazzi doesn’t even believe the story anymore, but the corporate media, desperate for people to read it, desperate for anything, plays it like it’s legit.
Even CBS Sunday Morning, generally a solid news program, was so desperate to run a piece on sex addiction — a piece that was tied to Tiger’s alleged problem — that it kept saying Woods was at the clinic and wouldn’t even hedge its bets. Even though, the story was dead by Sunday.
Well, it was dead until, somebody started the rumour that Elin was at Brett Favre’s house in Hattiesburg. Huh? WTF.
Of course, when it comes to big corporate media, Tiger wasn’t the only crazy talk this week…
In fact, this is how screwed up the corporate media is in this country. Last Saturday, a “protest” that drew, maybe, 300 people gets main-story treatment on the website of the Winnipeg Free Press (it couldn’t get front page treatment because there is no Sunday paper anymore).
That was a story? Twice the number of people that attended the protest, attend home games of the Providence College Freemen basketball team and the Free Press has told MCAC commissioner Bill Wedlake that it has “… absolutely no interest in your league.” No wonder daily newspapers are dying. They cater only to the people whose Kool-Aid they drink.
It’s weird, wonderful media world.