Reporting am news bizarre want submit as it gets

[Senegoid]

Is there something funny polluting the drinking water at some news reporting agencies?

Yahoo reports a stupid story of a 6-year old kid who called 911 to report his dad for running a red light. (The actual facts, apparently: Kid called 911 after they were back home. Dad says he came to a full stop then made a right turn. Kid, apparently a budding Republican or Sov Cit for whom facts don’t matter, says it doesn’t matter if he made a right turn. You don’t drive through a red light, period, full stop, no joinder created.)

The article is full of links to other related articles that, in fact, aren’t even remotely related. Example:

@Yahoo News

Robbie and his dad were actually back at their home in Quincy, Massachusetts, having a barbecue when the boy called 911.

(Link in original.) That link goes to a story about some guy in China who tried to fix his washing machine and got his head stuck inside it (while it was still running), and the rescue folks had to use a circular saw to cut the machine apart. Another link in the text of the story leads to some bizarre news item about Shaquille O’Neal, and another goes to some story about a kid battling cancer getting sworn in as honorary FDNY firefighter.

And in a separate article on the same subject (I think), there was this, allegedly from some interview on ABC News:

@???

Things went to Massachusetts was seem to not want want call from a young boy who submits it on his. Own bad art supposedly running a red light take a look. An. Injury. And the capitol and eat and it caught my current. And go. The only good but he had to go to the car entitled hat a red light. Shout out to play now. Apparently the devils barbecuing. What it. Include kids say the pace about wants to talk to you. And it was the police at that would as it turns out at the wobble was making a left. Run a race and I’m right on it Rick with the red light apparently leaked cell. Mobile I’m. At Mitt doesn’t. Commissioners should know what they’re snitching up pops. So when you learn to drive you’ll find

Read More

I’m not making that up, but somebody else sure did. If it isn’t something in the water, it must be those black airplanes and their contrails.

[Senegoid]

(Missed edit window).

ETA: And no, that first article didn’t bother to mention if a cop came out to talk to the father, let alone whether he got a ticket.

[Czarcasm]

Title says what?

[dracoi]

The web is full of garbage and nonsense pages designed solely to attract advertising hits. I assume they are computer generated using basic language simulators. They pull words or phrases from some database of material and reassemble them. The result is much like your second link - lots of phrases that look enough like language to fool Google, but that won’t make any sense to a human.

I don’t think Yahoo News would generate that kind of content on its own, but if it’s pulling content from third-party feeds, that would explain it.

[Colibri]

@Czarcasm

Title says what?

I almost deleted this as spam, since it looks like a lot of the garbled titles that spammers post. Luckily I recognized the OP’s name.

With the weekend’s barrage of streaming spam coming up, I get an itchy trigger finger. So be careful when composing thread titles.

[jtur88]

Let’s see if anybody can find a way to put the random words in the title into a syntactically valid sentence. Might as well make a game of this.

[Senegoid]

What’s interesting is that the Yahoo News front page grouped the two stories together on their headlines page. It’s hard to tell if the second story (the word salad one) was derived from the first story, but there are a lot words in common. It looks like Yahoo’s news aggregator (presumably automated, I suppose) found that second story and grouped it with the first.

The first story is still weird enough by itself, with those utterly off-the-wall unrelated links scattered throughout it.

ETA: I looked again a few minutes later, and the link to the word-salad was gone. Somebody noticed!

[Senegoid]

@jtur88

Let’s see if anybody can find a way to put the random words in the title into a syntactically valid sentence. Might as well make a game of this.

Suggest moving thread to Thread Games Forum ?

[Alley_Dweller]

@Senegoid

What’s interesting is that the Yahoo News front page grouped the two stories together on their headlines page. It’s hard to tell if the second story (the word salad one) was derived from the first story, but there are a lot words in common. It looks like Yahoo’s news aggregator (presumably automated, I suppose) found that second story and grouped it with the first.

The first story is still weird enough by itself, with those utterly off-the-wall unrelated links scattered throughout it.

ETA: I looked again a few minutes later, and the link to the word-salad was gone. Somebody noticed!

The word salad one appears to be a transcript of this video segment from the television show “The View.”

The transcript was either made by a real bad speech-to-text program or by a non-native speaker of English.

Here is a transcript I made of the show:

Police in Quincy Massachusetts received a 911 call from a young boy who was snitchin’ on his own dad for supposedly running a red light. Take a look.

Here is what the word salad article says:

Things went to Massachusetts was seem to not want want call from a young boy who submits it on his. Own bad art supposedly running a red light take a look.

I won’t bother to transcribe the whole segment, but if you listen to it and follow along in the word salad article, it will become obvious. It’s not some random word generator, it’s just bad transcription.

[Senegoid]

I couldn’t view the video, but I did wonder if it was something like that. Now we know.

[Nawth_Chucka]

@Alley_Dweller

The word salad one appears to be a transcript of this video segment from the television show “The View.”

The transcript was either made by a real bad speech-to-text program or by a non-native speaker of English.

Here is a transcript I made of the show:

Police in Quincy Massachusetts received a 911 call from a young boy who was snitchin’ on his own dad for supposedly running a red light. Take a look.

Here is what the word salad article says:

Things went to Massachusetts was seem to not want want call from a young boy who submits it on his. Own bad art supposedly running a red light take a look.

I won’t bother to transcribe the whole segment, but if you listen to it and follow along in the word salad article, it will become obvious. It’s not some random word generator, it’s just bad transcription.

When things don’t *quite *go to hell, they go to Massachusetts.