The Onion: even better than the real thing?
While other newspapers desperately add gardening sections, ask readers to share their favorite bratwurst recipes, or throw their staffers to ravenous packs of bloggers for online question-and-answer sessions, The Onion has focused on reporting the news. The fake news, sure, but still the news. It doesn’t ask readers to post their comments at the end of stories, allow them to rate stories on a scale of one to five, or encourage citizen-satire. It makes no effort to convince readers that it really does understand their needs and exists only to serve them. The Onion’s journalists concentrate on writing stories and then getting them out there in a variety of formats, and this relatively old-fashioned approach to newspapering has been tremendously successful.
An interesting Reason magazine article via MetaFilter, where MeFite Tiresias isn’t impressed by interactive journalism:
A part of the problem, for me, has been the newsmedia’s endless parade of “What Do You Think?”s — the slew of worthless interactive content, the endless ratings, and, dear God, the comments, the comments on fucking everything…. they just turn even the most serious subjects into mere entertainment for a certain kind of person who may not know too much about a subject, but now has the ability to argue passionately about it.
Which is a pretty good description of some interactive sites, particularly those newspapers whose comments sections are usually populated by idiots, bigots and bores. *cough*Evening Times!*cough*
In the current issue of NUJ house magazine The Journalist, Victor Noir writes about viewer interaction:
I gather from a BBC source that half the images they get are of people’s cats…
Cats.
Another who worked at a BBC regional studio says that viewers were asked to send in pictures illustrating the weather. What did they get? Snaps of bedraggled-looking moggies in the rain.
It’s the future of news!
It wouldn’t be so bad if the desire for interactivity at all costs didn’t infect pretty much everything. A good example of what I mean is last week’s Location Location Location: Best and Worst Live programme (hey, I’m waiting for baby Bigmouth to come along, I’m bored…). It’s a fairly lightweight bit of TV – various stats (crime, average salaries, percentage on sickness benefit, that sort of thing) compiled into a league table of the best and worst places to live in the UK. And it was interactive, so when a particular place was mentioned, the viewers were exhorted to get in touch and have their say. And they said one of two things:
MY TOWN DOESN’T SUCK YOU SUCK
Or:
MY TOWN SUCKS
Which meant a 20-minute programme lasted for three and a half days (although to be fair, some of that was phone-in-scandal-induced panic of the “If you’re watching this on video and you’re too stupid to realise that this is no longer live, don’t call! Don’t text! PLEASE, IN THE NAME OF GOD DON’T GET IN TOUCH!” variety, which amused me immensely.)
Tiresias again:
There’s nothing really wrong with it, you know, it’s just shooting the shit and we all do it, but now it’s not really just shooting the shit. It’s being published and legimitized, and this middle of the road, well-meaning but ill-informed drivel is pretty much setting the tone of the debate.
60 Responses to “The Onion: even better than the real thing?”
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McGazz on October 24th, 2007
Sock-puppetry is where someone creates one or more fake IDs so they can post their opinions while pretending to be someone else, and therefore hiding any vested interest they have.
Coming from a member of the Labour Party, a statement on a messageboard or blog like: “from what I can see, the Tories have no chance in this by-election” is going to be ignored by most as political shenanigans, but will be considered differently if it appears to be coming from the mouth of a neutral local observer, just offering up their tuppenceworth. And that’s a mild example.
Gary on October 24th, 2007
S2, Stephen, you’re both making similar points so if you don’t mind I’ll group ‘em together:
I don’t think the problem is so much that the BNP do that as that the other parties don’t.
Why is it OK to post on something you happen to stumble across, but not OK to post when you’ve been told by someone or something else that a discussion is going on?
Isn’t a big part of it intent, what’s being posted and the scale of it? It’s definitely a case of grey areas rather than absolutes, and I’m very tired so I probably won’t make much sense, but I’ll try anyway.
In the case of political parties, there are pretty strict rules on what they can and cannot say. So they can interpret things in different ways and cherry pick statistics, which of course is against the spirit of the rules, but they can’t (usually) say outright lies and get away with it. But by encouraging grassroots supporters to post comments or to insert particular stories in blogs, potentially they could be doing that – without having to take responsibility for that.
To take a stupid example, the Tories couldn’t run a poster campaign saying GORDON BROWN EATS BABIES. But they could create a baby-eating meme where someone knows someone who works in A&E, and they had to hush up a case because it was El Gordo. Richard Gere and the hamster or *insert pop star name* and the stomach pump of man-milk, or *dj name* and the stuck vibrator, but for political reasons and spread it through comments, blogs etc.
Obviously this stuff goes on already – BNP stuff in English council elections, for example, where everybody believed the council was spending all its money on a predominantly Asian estate at the expense of a predominantly white one; utterly untrue but people believed it anyway – but online facilitates it happening on a much, much bigger scale.
In the case of coordination, again it’s intent, context and all that. People’s attention being drawn to something on a big scale gives me the heebie-jeebies – it’s not word of mouth in many cases, it’s 4,000 people being told “this is what’s going on, do this now”. That was certainly the case with the Jerry Springer The Opera thing, where people who hadn’t seen something complained en masse and demanded Something Must Be Done about something they had only been told about. And it’s been a very successful tactic used by religious groups in the US.
Again, it’s what’s posted. Are people going to a site or discussion en masse to engage and try and win people over, or to carpet-bomb them into submission or conversion? If it’s the latter it’s more of a crusade than a right to reply, IMO.
In the real world, if someone spouts some appalling racist nonsense, says that it’s been proven that wi-fi eats your legs or something like that you can debate it. With co-ordinated “grassroots” campaigns, it’s the equivalent of someone saying something appalling and then when you try to talk to them, 1 million people are teleported in to shout you down.
Does that make any sense?
Gary on October 24th, 2007
God, I must be tired, because basically I wanted to say this:
It’s not about inviting your friends along to participate in a debate, it’s about drumming up numbers to make it look like Joe Public agrees with you.
And instead I took about 500 words.
I guess the point – for me – is: what do I, the reader, get from user-provided content if that content isn’t user-created but vested-interest created?
Gary on October 24th, 2007
I know! It’s spin.
That’s the problem I have. It’s New Labour’s Excalibur rapid rebuttal system writ large. Shoot the messenger rather than engage with the message.
Squander Two on October 25th, 2007
> My original point in this thread was that, as forums and the like are designed to allow a cross-section of public opinion, when forums are astroturfed, “[p]assing readers, assuming comments represent public opinion at large, are led to believe that certain views are much more popular than they actually are”.
Well, I’ll repeat my original point, then, which is that you’re a passing reader, you don’t assume that the comments represent public opinion at large, and you are not led to believe that certain views are much more popular than they really are. So what your comment boils down to is “Most people are stupider than me.”
> Are people going to a site or discussion en masse to engage and try and win people over, or to carpet-bomb them into submission or conversion?
Is it possible to carpet-bomb people into submission or conversion, though? Just through blathering ont’ Web? I seriously doubt it. You’re much more likely to carpet-bomb people into getting bored and annoyed and buggering off.
I don’t think the motives of the people posting the comments matter that much. The comments themselves are either true or not and either persuasive or not. A true and persuasive comment posted as part of a sustained political campaign is no better or worse than a true and persuasive comment posted by a passer-by with no party affiliation — because what matters is whether the comment can be debunked (if it’s true, it can’t) and whether it changes anyone’s mind. Just as a lie is no better coming from someone with good intentions than it is from someone with bad.
Something that seems to be missed here is the reason that some organisations resort to these tactics anyway: they’re small minorities. Is it not a little odd, all this worrying that people are going to have their minds changed by the sheer weight of numbers of groups who, in fact, do not have weight of numbers on their side? Take the GIYUS example. They post on Comment is Free. And we’re worried that, what, if Guardian readers see too many of these comments they’ll start supporting Israel against Palestine? That’s likely, is it?
And is there anyone here who decides to hold political opinions just because those opinions look like they might be popular? Or is the worry, yet again, that, while none of us would do something that stupid, most people aren’t as clever as us enlightened souls?
A statistic often mentioned is that, under Thatcher, about half The Sun’s readership voted Labour (maybe they still do — I have no idea). These are the stupid sheep-like group-thinking readers of crappy tabloids mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Reading a paper that told them, every single day, that Labour was crap and Thatcher was great, half of them voted Labour. That suggests to me a greater independence of mind than people here seem willing to credit them with.
Squander Two on October 25th, 2007
Though the fact that, first time round, half of them voted for Michael Foot, admittedly doesn’t imply the greatest judgment.
Squander Two on October 25th, 2007
One more thing…
> But they could create a baby-eating meme where someone knows someone who works in A&E, and they had to hush up a case because it was El Gordo. Richard Gere and the hamster or *insert pop star name* and the stomach pump of man-milk, or *dj name* and the stuck vibrator, but for political reasons and spread it through comments, blogs etc.
But this has always been done. That’s not to defend it, but to say that you perhaps overestimate the extra impact user-generated comment can have on this sort of thing. Look at “Let them eat cake”: a mistranslation, expressing (if you understand obscure French bakery law) the exact opposite of the sentiment it is always taken to represent, and definitely not said by Marie-Antoinette, who did a lot of charitable work for the poor. Look at Richard III: quite a good king, apparently. If you’ve got the malice and the motive, you can assassinate a character extremely successfully without even needing the industrial revolution, let alone the Net.
McGazz on October 25th, 2007
“So what your comment boils down to is “Most people are stupider than me.””
I’m saying “*some* people are *more credulous* than me”, which is not the same thing.
Squander Two on November 9th, 2007
If anyone cares, I did email Language Log in the end. And this is what they said.
Stephen on November 10th, 2007
I care deeply, of course. ;-)
Thanks!