REAL NEWS OR FLUFF

The homepage on my home computer is Yahoo.com. I chose this as my homepage because Yahoo holds my email account and I like the layout of their page. It seems to be a good mix of links and news.

Almost every day there seems to be a news story about a suicide bombing in Iraq or somewhere else in the Middle East. Most recently there was one about 5 near-simultaneous suicide bombings that killed at least 122 people. Is this the featured story on Yahoo.com? No. A story about a Legoland re-creation of the Las Vegas strip at a California theme park is. To find the suicide bombing story at JSOnline.com you have to scroll down to the second story in world news. A worthless story about Bud Selig gets top billing at JSOnline.com.

So what gives? Is this more of the 'fluff sells' marketing approach that news outlets have been adopting to retain their audiences, or are we sick of seeing the same story over and over, and therefore it loses its newsworthiness? Probably both, but I still think the death of 122 people in one day in one city due to five suicide bombings is more important than fluff.

Maybe the newspapers are losing their audience because they don't report what's really going on in the world. Or because we've been bombarded with fluff stories, is this what we've been conditioned to want when we watch or read the news? I guess it's the same as asking what came first, the chicken or the egg?

I guess you just have to find a news outlet that agrees with you. I like CNN.com. It conveniently divides out stories into these sections: Latest, U.S., World, Technology, Entertainment, Politics, Law, Health, Science & Space, Travel, Education, Sports, and Business. This way one can ignore sports and entertainment because, while interesting and exciting, generally have about as much newsworthiness to me as a story about the weather. I take that back. The weather is more important to me than a story about whether Angelina Jolie adopted another foreign kid or not. But that's just me. . . .