The SF Weekly (or was it the Bay Guardian?) used to use something they called the “fluff-mayhem index” to gauge local news reports. The idea was that something like a cute animal, or a house on fire, has little news value, but is popular and easy to explain–in contrast to economic news, which is typically both hard to understand and lacks good graphics (except maybe money being printed / traders on the floor of the stock exchange / the brass bull statue near Wall Street / people jumping off the roofs of tall buildings–ha! just kidding on that last one). Well, every night TVBS has at least one “cute animal” story (I think they have a reporter stationed at the zoo), and at least one “sexy woman” story. (Notice how often they show runway models, and how they are invariably women–no coverage of men’s or children’s lines, let alone stuff like shoes or handbags.) Fires are shown frequently enough, along with people getting arrested (not allowed in the USA). In recent years they’ve taken to just downloading videos off of YouTube, for instance a water-skiing squirrel, stuff like that.
Last week the television news story that amused me the most was about a couple of dudes swimming in a pool. At least that’s what it looks like at first, then you find out they’re naked (scandalous) and hey-wait-a-minute, it’s a shrimping place, not a pool. Skinny dipping at a shrimping place, news at 11!
[quote=“Xeno”]Last week the television news story that amused me the most was about a couple of dudes swimming in a pool. At least that’s what it looks like at first, then you find out they’re naked (scandalous) and hey-wait-a-minute, it’s a shrimping place, not a pool. Skinny dipping at a shrimping place, news at 11!
[/quote]
It would def be news if they were skinny-dipping with mantis shrimp. Those things punch, hard.
In weird/ugly/just plain WTF news: students go on a 5 day graduation trip together, 7 of them come back pregnant. The hell!
Apple Daily, of course.
Was it in Bosnia? A class of 13-14 year old girls on a trip to Sarajevo, 7 out of 28 get pregnant (apparently from their boyfriends, not teachers or anything like that).
dailymail.co.uk/news/article … -trip.html
Yes. Daily Mail is the paper of choice for Taiwanese outlets reporting “international” news.
Okay, so the the “foreigner of the week award” has to go to this guy.
I’m sure dry-humping the staff seemed like a good idea at the time …