Fark News vs Real News

After reading Jamie’s post about Fake vs. Real News, I feel like I should come out to also admit I am not a big politics buff. Don’t worry Jamie, you’re not alone! I too am one of the people who just don’t get it as much as I’d like to. Where I get my news is usually on the internet, through large forums, community websites and word-of-mouth (or should I say word-of-text).

“What is Fark exactly? Fark is what fills space when mass media runs out of news. Fark is supposed to look like news... but it's not news. It's Fark.”

Fark.com is one of my favourite news websites where, very much like Digg.com, hosts a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. These are links submitted by Fark users who have then been approved by administrators. They are also placed into categories like Not News (their signature category), Sports, Business, Politics and sub-categories such as Interesting, Amusing, Cool, Strange, Scary, Weird, etc. The list goes on; however, I feel the main focus of this process is to draw out the most entertaining, albeit useless, pieces of the bunch. To this, I fall victim to the youth statistic of preferring infotainment over CNN.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with CNN. Or at least there is yet to be any incriminating evidence against it. It is a so-called reputable news source, free of subjectivity, fair and impartial. Aside from that, it lacks interpretation and active audience participation. Today our youth culture is making the big switch from the formal newsroom to the comedy channels, particularly The Daily Show.

In the Megan Boler reading, we realize that satire is a great method in order to portray contradictions in our skeptical post 9/11 society:

“…because irony turns on the unsaid; it uses the dominant forms of logic to express what is otherwise silenced as dissenting didacticism; it expresses horrors in forms that are palatable; it creates a sense of shared meaning and community by using the unsaid to create a recognition of the dominant culture as misrepresentation."

In The Daily Show, manifested in the tradition of popular news-related television comedies (such as Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” and This Hour Has 22 Minutes), we see such an example of political irony to expose other possible interpretations. While news stations are telling us what things mean, John Stewart is telling us what they really mean. I find it fascinating how a simple aspect like humour can alter people’s perceptions and initiate some sort of large-scale awareness. Was this not mentioned in Boler’s article that even court jesters were banned during troubled times? Furthermore, Jeffrey Jones claims that “…humor offers a means of reestablishing common-sense truths to counter the spectacle, ritual, pageantry, artifice, and verbosity that often cloak the powerful.”

More importantly in a bottom-up model, the basis of satire gives a voice to the people and ultimately, gives them a taste of power. Something I believe should forever survive in our democratic society.

References:

http://www.fark.com/

Megan Boler, "The Transmission of Political Critique after 9/11: 'A new form of desperation'?" <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/11-boler.php>

Jeffrey P. Jones, " 'Fake' News versus 'Real' News as Sources of Political Information: The Daily Show and Postmodern Political Reality"
<http://www.odu.edu/al/jpjones/fake%20news.pdf>