I just clicked on this MSN news headline about Steve Irwin (the crocodile hunter) because it looked like it would be enlightening.
Go ahead. Click on it and read the story. Then come back and give me an answer. What’s the fucking point?!
Why did the reporter write a story that has absolutely nothing to do with the headline?
I don’t care that Steve Irwin’s father doesn’t get along with his daughter in law. I want to know why the Crocodile Hunter was suffering. He looked okay to me. A bit eccentric for sure, but no evidence of suffering.
So can someone please explain to my aging brain… What’s the fucking point?
It’s an MSN story. It doesn’t need to have a point, it only needs to pique your interest so that you’ll click on the link and be exposed to another page of ads.
What makes you think the reporter didn’t ask? It says the father gave no details elaborating on it. People refuse to talk about that stuff all the time.
The headline fits the story perfectly. The story is about the dad saying Irwin suffered. The headline is “Dad says “Crocodile Hunter” suffered”. What’s the question here?
Why write the story at all? No clue here. His dad gave an interview, someone thought it was worth a story, the AP picked it up. shrug
People who are really interested in reading the actual news don’t generally get it from MSN.
Since I don’t see any questions in the OP to which anyone here is likely to be able to provide a factual answer, and since this is more of a rant than anything else, I’m moving it to the Pit.
Okay. I wasn’t sure where to post. But I do think there is a question to be answered. Why are they wasting our time with worhless stories?
If the headline said:
Cecil Adams had a horrible childhood.
And the story said:
Cecil Adams was born in Chicago, went to school in New York, works for a newspaper and has a loving family. An acquaintance once said he had a horrible childhood, but wouldn’t elaborate.
Would that be worthy of a news story? Would the headline be appropriate? I think not.
But the headline doesn’t say “Crocodile Hunter suffered”, it says “Dad says Crocodile Hunter suffered”. The story isn’t about Steve Irwin’s suffering (and it isn’t billed that way) – it’s about his father saying that he suffered, and the headline conveys that appropriately. It’s a small but important distinction.
Again, I won’t vouch for the news value of the story. You read it on MSN.
Like I said, I don’t think you’re going to get a definitive answer to that in GQ.
If you prefer, I’ll lock this one and you can try again in Great Debates or IMHO. In moving it here I also was taking into account the obscenity in the title.
Yeah, I guess there is really no definitive answer. It’s just that I’m so constantly bombarded with useless information, or really NONinformation, that I felt the need to speak out. It just pisses me off that I’m promised one thing and offered another. Kinda like going to an Italian restaurant and finding the menu is in Chinese.
Looked to me like he could’ve been talking about physical suffering. The guy’s knees were blown out for sure, and we can assume the rest of him wasn’t holding up very well either. He was rode hard and put away wet. Take a few quotes about that out of context and it looks like Bob’s talking about mental anguish, but - maybe he wasn’t?
Army Times does this shit all the time. The front page will have all these huge headlines with big font. Then, once you buy the thing, you find it doesn’t really have any useful information.
I recently bought one a couple weeks ago. The front page had a HUGE frontpage headline that read something like, “New Regulations for The New Army Service Uniform pg 8” or something. I mean they made it quite clear that one of their big stories would include information on the new Service Uniform. Certain particulars are still being decided at the top levels and we’ve all been waiting for them to finally decide and publish their regs.
I hadn’t heard any news on the uniform for like 6 months so I was eager to see decision results.
After paying the couple dollars, I sit down and turn to page 8. All they wrote was a small paragraph that basically said, “Army officials are still deciding on the new Service Uniform regulations”.
WTF!!!? What is the point of that? Why have a big huge headline just to say that nothing new has happened?
Because it helps sell newspapers. If there’s no news or no good stories… write good headlines.
What were you promised? For the third time, the headline says “Dad says Crocodile Hunter suffered”, which is exactly what the story is about.
If a headline read “Local father says son killed in Iraq” and the copy said that a local man held a press conference, and the man said that his son was killed in Iraq but declined to say how he was killed, would you complain that you were “promised one thing but offered another”?
When the entirety of the story can be summed up in a 5 word headline, there isn’t a story worth printing. At that point, the story isn’t “about” the headline, the story is only the headline, they just reword it a few times to take up space.
The second half of the story deals with his leaving the zoo. There, the 5 word headline would be “Crocodile Hunter Dad Quits Zoo”, and the followup would have provided actual details behind his involvement with the zoo, and the stated reasons he left. That is a news article (even if the subject isn’t newsworthy), simply repeating the fact that he quit 5 times without providing any other information is lousy reporting.
Let me say this a different way. You say Peanuthead got what he was promised. I say that he was “promised” a professionally written news story, and didn’t get it. What he got was a regurgitation of a headline, with no underlying details, no background information, nothing worth reading once you got past the concept in the headline.
That is not a professional news story, it’s a story written for no reason other than to have a few paragraphs of text to attach a “compelling” headline to. It is the epitome of sizzle without steak, and the OP is right to be pissed off, because he was lead to believe there was a story behind the headline.
I’ve never gone to MSN lured by the promise of a professionally written news story. CNN, sure (and been disappointed on occasion), my local newspaper, sure (and been disappointed far more often). But MSN? No. I mean, come on. The headline is currently sandwiched between “Carrie and Chace split via text” and “Daniel Craig talks about the new ‘Bond’”. You were expecting hard-hitting investigative reporting here?
I do not dispute that it is a bad story, that there’s not really a point to it. I hate press conference-for-publicity stories. I’m just not buying the “headline doesn’t match the story” complaint when it actually does.
I too hate these- “Britney Spears hairdresser thinks she’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown”, “Friend of Derek Jeter says he may retire in two years”- specualtion from a third party is NOT news.