Let Us Have A Moment Of Wankery, If You Will

By Jocelyn Geboy in News on Dec 27, 2005 7:29PM

We don’t care about the actual story. But after last week’s discussion of the mainstream media and their general lack of muckraking and what actually constitutes journalism, we’d like to do a little media masturbation and instead do a story on the stories.

It seems that Oprah’s private jet was forced to return to the city airport in Santa Barbara after it struck a bird and the windshield was cracked. She and Stedman were not injured. (Newsflash: Bird takes on jet. Bird loses. Humans leave wreckage unscathed.)

ABC 7, CBS 2, the Chicago Tribune, and the Sun-Times all felt the need to run a story on their websites, but the story was so demanding of investigation that they just ran the canned AP story ad nauseam. We just can’t figure out why these kinds of stories are so important and why they always end up on CNN as “breaking news.”

**UPDATE: It turns out it *wasn't* a bird, but wear and tear on the glass. It was fatigued. Thank god for that.

Image via mediabistro.com