Hate all you want: But you’ll miss the real stories
I am one of those persons who likes to read little “heart-string pulling” stories.
You know, a guy helps a homeless man tie his shoes and the homeless man ends up being a multi-gazillionaire and buys the guy a new car so he doesn’t have to walk to work (something like 27 miles from his family’s farm where his father is suffering from nose warts and his mother has chronic gas) to earn the money he’s saving up to go to college to be a veterinarian specializing in Himalayan yaks with hoof fungus disease and bladder-control issues.
Because those things have a direct impact on global warming.
It’s kind of a specialists’ specialty.
I also like reading about a kid who offers to wax a guy’s car so he can earn bus money so that he can get back and forth to school to become a doctor.
The guy who owns the car is so moved — not to mention he is a brain surgeon from a similar disadvantaged upbringing — he makes the kid an honorary brain surgeon and the kid winds up saving seven guppies from the fish tank in the hospital’s doctor’s lounge from some strange brain disease.
And it has something to do with human-rights issues in some third-world country.
It’s touching. Really.
And there was the family who got stuck in an airport in Denver (or Salt Lake City or Billings or that one in South Dakota) and were all so depressed and sad until the youngest daughter saw an older woman and offered her a sip of her soda — you know, to cheer her up — and the woman ended up not being stuck at the airport at all, but was waiting for her private jet because she was soooooooo rich and hated all people who weren’t sooooooo rich until the little girl offered her a sip of her soda and so she …
Told the family to please not sit in the area where the sooooooo rich people sat while waiting on their private jets.
And she wanted them deported to some country in South America (even though the family is from Hershey, Pennsylvania).
But wait, it gets more touchy-feely.
The father of this family records the whole thing on his smartphone — thinking his little daughter might get a 1.8 million-likes reaction on Twitter (and therefore justifying his existence) for her touching display of sharing a soda with an old, sooooooo rich lady (though they did not know she was soooooo rich, OK) that he might save his job as a print journalist by showing how adept he is by posting crap on social media.
The video goes viral, the woman’s company is shattered and ends up closing and filing for bankruptcy, and people lose their jobs (three people who pasted “We Love Nebraska” on authentic Middle Eastern “Lucky Lotto” talismans), and the father gets a great job opportunity filing video and blog updates from some disease-infested region of the planet — which he does from home (because, hey, who’s going to know the difference?).
Plus, he doesn’t come in contact with all of those nasty and fatal diseases.
Great story, I say. Win-win, I say.
Sorta.
The aforementioned stories are, of course, not so true.
But on this last Thanksgiving weekend, CNN posted a story about a grandmother who texted Thanksgiving dinner plans to the wrong person.
The same CNN that is not trustworthy and biased and nobody seems to like.
Anyways ...
Once the mistake was discovered and the grandmother and the recipient of said wayward text saw photos of each other …
Well, the young man was still invited.
“That’s what grandmothers do, they feed everyone.”
In 2019, they celebrated their fourth Thanksgiving together.
Maybe you saw the story. I thought it was good.
And it had video, quotes attributed to a real person, and no politics. It was about people.
My point is, with all the hate thrown at the media, I think I can now understand why.
We don’t care about your opinion when we write news. No offense, we just want the facts.
The first three stories I made up.
I kinda put together some “true stories” I read on the internet and just threw that stuff together.
Those three stories are no more a lie than the stories that I first read and inspired this column.
See, you can hate all you want: The media that doesn’t tell your side of the story the way you think it should be told, the way you want it to be told.
Because, regardless of the facts, some people don’t want the truth.
They’d rather have the top three stories because they go with their world view.
Understand this:
When media — of any form — bows to that mindset in order to be popular, to not lose advertisers or “readers,” or just to kiss the behinds of certain people, and forgets about the simple promise to relate just the facts ...
We are all as ignorant as the day we were born.
I think folks are making up their own news. If a media outlet has that same news fantasy as they do, then that media outlet is “reliable news.”
But hey, we — the real media — go on. Doing our best to bring you our best.
Just so you get to hear about the misadventures of a grandmother texting a stranger and a friendship is made. ... If that’s your mindset.
I like good stories.
And I don’t care who looks good in them.