John Lennon sang the strangeness of last centuries' News. This centuries' News is no less strange. Has News ever been anything but strange? Readers or, as now said, consumers, have no certain way of knowing that anything in the News is true, or important, or even spelled correctly.
Faith is necessary.
You must take the reporter's words for it.
"Spin", is inevitable. People don't generally see
their own bias. Some don't even try. Strangeness is also inevitable, literally; nearly everything reported in the News happened at someplace strange to you, where you weren't.
Even so. "Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire" seems stranger than usual. Nothing about it becomes less strange when we read-on to discover:
"And though the holes were rather small, They had
to count them all, Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall".
The sarcasm of Lennon's fictional News isn't far from the truth.
Useless information has always been News-worthy -
so long as it's amusing. So too, anything that titillates: personal tragedies; accidents; scandals; or anything else that amounts to little more than printed gossip.
No one seems troubled that so much of the News
is devoted to trivialities rather than information useful to decision-making by citizens who give a damn.
Perhaps there's too few such citizens to support such a News source. The News business is primarily entertainment business.
My Grandad Bill occasionally flipped through the local paper. He didn’t take anything he read seriously; "Paper lays still, you can put whatever you want on it".
I don't recall Grandad Bill ever saying he was from the "Show me" State - but he was.
Thoughtful skepticism is the best way to get anything useful out of the News.
Mmm" Imagine that. I'll be darned . Well, I thought as much.