Surrender to Fluff
By Scott Smith in News on Aug 25, 2005 6:46PM
Chicagoist has always had a love/hate relationship with the news. For all its faults, we love it anyway. Sort of like a dog that pees the rug and chews our furniture but nuzzles against us at night to tell us about our how the economic stability of Chile might affect our country’s foreign policy. And we know the big cliché in the news biz is that nothing really happens in August, but it doesn’t seem like the local and national MSM are even trying anymore (and apparently neither are we...).
For example, take a look at the “top headlines” on Chicagotribune.com today: the big news story? A TV show filming at Joliet Prison. The top business story? MTV will offer broadband coverage of the VMAs so that you won’t miss a minute of the glory that is the Diddy or any of the other uncensored, staged moments of hilarity (we’ve never been sadder that Courtney Love is locked up in rehab than we are right now).
Broadcast news isn’t much better. Earlier this week, local news outlets were leading with the tragedy that football players in Naperville might not get to go to the playoffs due to a teacher’s strike that might happen...and then didn’t. And thank God we saw an amicable resolution to that problem so we could turn our attention to ghetto fries at Max’s Italian Beef which, according to CBS 2 Chicago, causes some customers to “raise their eyebrows” while “other customers say they don't have a problem with it.”
We haven’t seen this much invented “news” since the last time TNT showed Wag The Dog.
Who knew that Bob Costas would emerge as the great white knight of integrity in a world gone mad? Costas, filling in for Larry King this week, refused to host an entire hour devoted to Natalee Holloway, the missing young woman in Aruba. 
This is what it’s come to, Internet: journalistic integrity from someone who once appeared in the film Pootie Tang.
So we’re giving up. Until September rolls around, we’re just going to watch first-run episodes of Taradise and read Us Weekly.