It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass off Crap as News » (Reprint)

Drew Curtis founded Fark.com after several beers one night in 1999. Today it averages 3.5 to 5 million visitors per month. Media corporations worldwide continue to use Fark as a resource to judge which stories are newsworthy. He has been featured in Time, The Washington Post, PC Magazine, Maxim, PHM, and Playboy; on hundreds of radio stations around the country; and was recently on the cover of Business 2.0 and named one of the “50 Most Important People on the Web” by PC World.

Have you ever noticed certain patterns in the news you see and read each day? Perhaps it's the blatant fearmongering on your local six o'clock news ("Tsunami could hit the Atlantic any day!" Everybody panic!) or the seasonal articles that appear year after year ("Roads will be crowded this holiday season." Thanks, AAA.). It's Not News, It's Fark is Drew Curtis's insightful, uproarious look at the go-to stories mass media uses when there's just not enough hard news to fill a daily paper or television broadcast.

Drew identifies eight stranger-than-fiction media patterns that prove just how little actual reporting reporters do today. It's Not News, It's Fark exposes the "news" that was never fit to print, and promises to have you laughing along the way.

CNN.com

A funny book, containing some of the site's greatest hits, but it's also a sharp and well-deserved criticism of the news media—and life in a capitalistic, all-information, all-the-time world.

What Is Fark?     1
Media Fearmongering     19
Unpaid Placement Masquerading as Actual Article     59
Headline Contradicted by Actual Article     97
Equal Time for Nutjobs     111
The Out-of-Context Celebrity Comment     135
Seasonal Articles     157
Media Fatigue     195
Lesser Media Space Fillers     223
Epilogue: What Should Mass Media Be Doing Instead?     251
Acknowledgments     267
Index     269