I sometimes pass through the news feeds on places like Yahoo as a break from reading about things people actually care about, like whether the Red Sox are leading the Eastern Division. They are, by the way, as I write this.
I did a piece not long ago about the relative prominence of certain pieces in those news feeds, and the control that feeding structures like Yahoo have about the placement of such pieces, fake news or not, with conservative pieces sliding far down the list. A typical Yahoo feed will lead off with pieces from leftist or very leftist sites like Newsweek, Salon, Vox, HuffPost and the like -- lots of them -- before you get to one from Fox or the Washington Times.
In fact, you will see fluff pieces from People or Style placed far ahead of the first conservative (or even neutral) piece, even if they're about meaningless things like four-day-old royal wedding "news."
But what got me today was a grouping. Now, a "grouping", or whatever it is technically called in a news feed, is when the feeding site puts three headlines together, linking to three separate pieces about the same topic or news item.
As I read it mid-morning on Wednesday, there was a grouping that led the entire feed. Obviously it must be important, right, if they give us three related story headlines to link to multiple pieces on the same topic?
Well, you would think.
At least you would think that if you know who Shayanna Jenkins is. I did not, as of Wednesday morning when I awoke, and I'm pretty sure that by the weekend I will have forgotten once again who she is. But she has something to do with Aaron Hernandez, the murdering thug who used to play in the NFL, who was convicted, sent to jail for life and then killed himself, and whom we have mostly forgotten.
Now, exactly what she had to do with Hernandez is apparently unclear. That's because Miss Jenkins is pregnant, over a year after Hernandez killed himself, and that was the story. Now, it should be noted that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was testifying before Congress at the same moment the grouping of headlines regarding Miss Jenkins' pregnancy was at the very top of the Yahoo "news" feed, which tells you a lot about Yahoo's sense of what is important.
But I digress, a little.
The reason that I did this piece is not because some utterly obscure young woman is pregnant, and it is not even that such an utterly unimportant event is regarded by Yahoo as important enough to top off their feed with headline links to three different stories about it. And it's not that three "news" outlets (People, the Daily Mail and USA Today) even wrote stories about her pregnancy, no matter who the father was.
Nope. It is about the headlines themselves. So let me provide them to you, in order:
"Aaron Hernandez' Fiancee Shayanna Jenkins Reveals She Is Pregnant 13 Months After His Death"
"Aaron Hernandez' Widow Announces She Is Pregnant"
"Aaron Hernandez' Former Fiancee Announces Pregnancy"
Are you with me? Is Miss Jenkins a widow? Is she a fiancee? Is she a former fiancee? Did they get married? Did they break off the engagement before he killed himself?
How on earth does Yahoo provide three headlines with three different characterizations of the relationship between the expectant mother and the dead murderer, two of which are completely contradictory? Either they got married and she is a widow, or they didn't and she is, well, not.
OK, I don't really care if they ever got married, or who she is, or who the father is. I didn't even read the articles, and I don't plan to. But even this trivial example is yet another illustration of the Blind Man and the Elephant situation we have with the media, where you end up making assumptions based on one story only to have them contradicted by another, and you ultimately have to assume that "the news is very like an elephant", and you just don't know.
I no longer can rely on the accuracy of even a simple item in a stupid piece about a person I don't even care about.
That's where we are now.
Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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