My home page is Yahoo! There are reasons for this, some of them good, but all of them dull. I won’t bother you with them. I simply want to notice that the recent college graduates, college dropouts, high school students, and GED pursuers who select and headline the featured articles that run on such digital substitutes for newspapers are even more grossly bigoted than the New York Times.
And that’s saying something.
Here is a selection of recent Yahoo! News headlines:
“Romney on ‘Apology Tour’”
“Did Romney Play It Too Safe?”
“Obama Rattles Romney”
“Romney Blimp Crash-Lands”
Reporting on the most hotly contested “battleground state,” at the moment when it had become still more hotly contested, Yahoo ran this as a headline: “Mitt Romney Still Hasn't Given Up on Ohio.” If you clicked on the headline, you would see this at the beginning of the article: “Seeking middle-class and women voters, Romney intones ‘change’ mantra in Ohio."Can anyone imagine such a site featuring an article in which Obama intoned a “change” mantra?
The old journalistic rule was “dog bites man — not news; man bites dog — news.” The digital clones have it the other way around. No one expected Romney to give up on Ohio, but that’s the headline: he didn’t give up. Meanwhile, Yahoo! found no room for headlines about the shockingly daft response of the Obama administration to the massacre in Libya, or to anything else that might bring the administration into question. There was space, however, for a headline about a Democratic senator in quest of reelection: “Mother of Mo. Sen. McCaskill Dies at Age 84.” Yes, that is the news the nation must know.
There’s no limit to this crap. On the day when tropical storm Sandy struck the east coast, a Yahoo! headline read, “People Named Sandy More Likely to Give to Obama.”
