>>1445575>April 1912, Titanic just sunk, imagine if the first couple pages, instead being about such a huge tragedy, was 10 pages of some celebrity shitting himself after getting black out drunk at a bourgeois party. >This is how news is done today, irrelevant tabloids are blasted into the front page of the internet and all the important stuff is relegated to the ass end of "the newspaper of the internet".That's a pertinent observation. I'm not entirely sure it holds up if you wisdom the "frontpage of the internet" analogy but with any sort of "legacy news outlet" (the only ones with "access") it certainly rings true.
Reminds me of German Hesse's "Glass Bead Game" though.
Written between 1931-1943, in Germany, GBG is anti-fascist Hesse describing bougie Weimar Germany's purposeful blindness and refusal to believe a(nother) war was headed their way by means of a deep and total immersion in complete bullshit of the sort you seen to be describing.
—quote—
The age takes its name from the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer among the writers of them poked fun at their own work.
[…]
The producers of these trivia were in some cases attached to the staffs of the newspapers; in other cases they were free-lance scriveners. Frequently they enjoyed the high-sounding title of "writer," but a great many of them seem to have belonged to the scholar class. Quite a few were celebrated university professors. (And how much more so today? With "the collapse of news journalism"?)
Among the favorite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore such titles as "Friedrich Nietzsche and Women's Fashions of 1870," or "The Composer Rossini's Favorite Dishes," or "The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of Great Courtesans," and so on. (90% of The Guardian articles come to mind here… ) Another popular type of article was the
historical background piece on what was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as "The Dream
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