jiffy news revisited... sort of

Some of you may have already read Brandon Roger's most recent post regarding news and gossip. He talks about how we like to read stories about all kinds of silly things in personal lives of complete strangers. So there's that.

To further emphasize his point, and to magnify how messed up our priorities as a country are, I give you CNN.com's top 10 most viewed stories as of 1:55pm, September 26th, 2007. I copied it straight off their website.

These are the most read stories of the day. If someone who didn't know what was going on in world affairs (Heather Hendrick) saw this list, they'd think that the third most pressing issue today is the fact that Elton John lost one of his home decorations. Well as it turns out, it isn't.

On a day when monks protesting for democracy in Myanmar are being killed by their country's military, we in America would rather read about how "pets have weight problems too"... amazing. On the heels of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York and the absolute verbal beating he received from Columbia University's president as he was being introduced, we read about a celebrities child with a handicap. With religious leaders being sentenced to jail for abetting in rape and Union workers ending their strike for rights, we read about Sarah Silverman jokes. If you wanted the links to any of the stories I dubbed "lesser" you'll have to visit CNN's website.

Seriously, there are ten stories more important than the ten that have been most visited on CNN today. I'm not sure who to point the finger at here. I started to point at the general new-checking public for valuing silly, mostly pointless stories over stories of substance. Then I decided to point at the media for feeding us the stories (and perspectives) that they feed us. But the reason, arguably, that media gives us what they do is that they know we love it. It's a messed up cycle. Thoughts?

Now is the cycle messed up enough to motivate me to revive Jiffy News? (No link provided for JN because it is, at this point, dead). Not sure. That remains to be seen.