In the World of News

Unless you've been living under a rock, the world has seen its fair share of news over the past several weeks. I tend to frequent Globe and Mail and the BBC myself for news sources, and I know I should add more to my arsenal, but I usually run out of time before I'm able to find other newspapers. However, I have friends that frequently supply me with articles from Fox News and CNN, which is decent, I suppose. Yet I have yet to go to their web pages to find any sources of news.

But, as I was alluding to earlier, it seems like the world has been seeing some very newsworthy happenings recently. Obviously, this economic downturn certainly takes the cake for having the most coverage. I could go off on a tangent and question how it makes sense for Wal-Mart to run promotions saying "You have no money, so buy from Wal-Mart where everything is cheap", but I won't. Because my topic for today is too important.

Allow me to use the Globe and Mail website as an example for the point I am about to make. The Globe enables the use of comments for any article that is posted on the site, meaning that I can read an article and type up a short post of what I think of it. When I first started visiting Globe and Mail, the big stories got approximately 4 or 5 comments, and the little stories had none. Nowadays, the breaking news tends to garner approximately 20-30 comments, the little stories netting about 4 or 5. Recently, though... a few stories have garnered a little bit extra attention.

For instance, there's been this whole thing in Parliament recently. When it was first announced that the Liberals and the NDP had formed a coalition and were ready to take down the Conservatives, the story managed to get a couple more than 30 comments. Note the sarcasm. Honestly, I stopped checking after the count read about 1200 comments. And that was the one article. They released like 10 different articles a day while the event was going on. It attracted massive attention. In other words, it was big news.

The economic crisis has been having a similar response across the world. People are worried, and they want to see more information about the stuff. The Globe and Mail articles are getting anywhere between 50-100 comments per post, which, considering there have been about 5 articles a day since the Bush Bailout Plan, is rather an impressive feat. And understandably so. People want to hear about how the world is potentially going to fall apart. Is the World Order going to survive the next year? Let's find out by reading the news! It makes sense. The popularity of such articles makes really good sense, and I welcome the increased attention and the increased discussion because people are making an effort to be informed. This is a good thing. It's high time people started thinking for themselves.

But then... I open up a web page to read the news, and I see something on the front page which should not be there. I don't see many comments, but the news is apparently as important as a political debacle, a economic recession, or any one of the various wars being waged across the world. The War in Afghanistan hit a grim milestone of 100 Canadian lives lost recently, solemnly marked in Canada, but it wasn't quite as important as this story was across the world. A New York Executive admitted to scamming wealthy individuals and banks around the world out of an estimated 50 billion dollars, but it that didn't get past this story. An American Governor allegedly attempted to sell a seat in the senate and was arrested for his actions, but that story wasn't quite as important as this one.

No, no, Ladies and Gentlemen. Oprah has hit the 200 pound mark. Hundreds of lives in Afghanistan, Thousands of lives in Iraq, billions of dollars being forfeited, political crises, millions of jobs being potentially lost, trillion dollar bailout packages....... and Oprah ate a little too much chocolate?

To which I must respectfully ask: Who cares? Really? How is Oprah not being able to fit into her little black dress more important than, say, this drastic leap forward that German scientists have supposedly made in the war against AIDS?

What a strange place we live in.

And on that bombshell, I'll talk to you tomorrow. I've got a pretty good idea of what I'm going to talk about, so I'll see you then.