Associated Content Attacked by Ham Sandwich; Bloody Sock is the Outcome

The week that was April 23rd-29th, 2007...dates that will live in infamy!

It all started, innocently enough with a fake news story about a ham sandwich submitted into the real news section. Somehow, the story got to the FOX news people and next thing you know it's featured on 'Fox and Friends' Tuesday. The snowball begins to roll down the hill; the media feeding frenzy is on.

But not enough heat has been put on FOX. Perhaps nobody really has faith in their news as 100% factual, and I can't disagree with you. I think that speaks for all of the network media, it is about ratings after all. I guess maybe they don't have to fact check.

The issue has hit a sore spot among the site's content producers as well. The writers here have a lot of pride in their work, and they probably feel like their good reputation has been ruined thanks to one person's mistake. But I think we get a little over-sensitive. If they want to compare the website to The Onion so be it. It might not be the best thing for the legitimate news writers but for the satirists our stock just jumped.

Let's be honest about the news section of this site, how many of those reports are first-hand ones? I am not trying to put down people who write the news articles. Most are well-written and flow well but they aren't scoops. Unless the story is local, then most of the time, a news source will have the report already up online before anyone here puts a story up about it. This site isn't in the news business; it is in the entertainment business.

I think that's where we lose focus on things. We have to either entertain, or get people's attention in some way. I say 'it's all about content' a lot but writing is also for entertaining, we are storytellers after all. We do not want to fool people though, and unfortunately we don't want to pass off real news as fake news. I am not saying we should go down that route.

What I am saying is that we aren't really a 'news' source for the internet, so we didn't damage any reputation. This incident did a lot more to damage FOX's credibility, they are an actual 'news' organization. If anything, we are a news source for ourselves, for our population of fellow writers. They do very well in fact-checking and we know they are credible, so where's the harm?

Again, I like the news feature here, we are lucky that we have people willing to write up news stories on things we might have missed, stuff that wasn't on your local tv news broadcast. I'm just saying that we might be thinking we are something we are not. And it does not mean we can not do more with news, but it requires people covering news beyond the local level. See what I mean? We just aren't set-up to do news.

So now we have this bloody sock and the most awkward segue of the week . For you British readers, I am not mad at my footwear because it just got taken by the Dryer Monster. It is about Curt Schilling's bloody sock from the 2004 playoffs. If you missed the second media frenzy of the week it went something like this: baseball game broadcaster calls the sock a fake according to a source, player x; player x denies it; the next day player x states that the media is too blame and the sock is real, the announcer misconstrued the facts; Schilling flips out on his blog at media and offers $1 million prize to prove Sockgate is real; silly blogger with an odd icon comes up with an actual theory (me hehe and you can read about it on my blog).

Ironically enough, the controversy began on Tuesday night during the broadcast of the Red Sox-Baltimore Orioles, the same day of the airing of the 'Fox and Friends' SandwichGate.

Thankfully, this controversy did not involve Associated Content.

In the end, perhaps all this media frenzy over socks and sandwiches was a good thing. Over the last few weeks we have seen racial slurs and a mass-shooting at a college university happen, all very bad and depressing problems. All this sillyness in the news this week was just that, but at least for a few days we forgot all about the 32 people that lost their lives at Virginia Tech. Or about 'nappy-headed ho's'.

Not dealing with the real issues can be detrimental but sometimes we go overboard with obsessing about it. Sometimes we need to obsess over harmless issues for a bit to balance the craziness out a bit.

And not take ourselves so seriously.