There is a nice story in this week’s issue about a family who saved a woman in grave danger. This isn’t about the story per se, but rather about how one “news” site treated it. Let’s start with the story:
Media
Front Page News
A fairly bizarre news story from the county seat of my recently-former Colorado home not only caught my eye, but quickly spread to national, and now international, headlines.
Pitching Star Trek
Or, Something from My Past Most Don’t Know About.
The Continuing Decline in News Reporting
I Really Rolled My Eyes at the poor reporting in the source for a story in this week’s issue. Let’s start with my version of the story:
Chuck Shepherd: News of the Weird
Chuck Shepherd started “News of the Weird” as a newspaper column in 1988, and was picked up by the Universal Press Syndicate in 1989. Similarly, a year after I started I was offered a contract by their biggest competitor, Creators Syndicate, almost certainly as way to compete with the very popular NotW, but I turned it down.
Authors for Libraries
The non-profit “Fight for the Future” — formed in 2012 to lead the successful fight against the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) and the “PROTECT IP Act” (PIPA) — has turned to protecting libraries from giant publishers who are trying to take away the right to loan books, particularly now that most books are published as ebooks.
The Best of April Fools:
Earlier Generations Did It Better
A lot of sites and publications will be running crazy stories as true to try to trick you today. Not me.
Badge of Honor, Tarnished
Guest Post by True Contributor Mike Straw
Every Sunday morning it’s a highlight of my week as I get to digest interesting and unusual news stories down to 100–200 words, then give it a slug at the top and a creative tagline at the end.
Shades of Gray
A Recent Story brought several questions from readers wanting to know why it referred to a Black guy and a white guy — with those specific capitalizations:
Spotify Slapped by More than Neil Young
“Irresponsible Advice from a Man with No Credibility” is what podcaster Joe Rogan said would be the title of his next book, and was the slug on a story about the Spotify controversy in this week’s issue:
My Dad’s Landlady
Those who know me may see the seeds of some of my own background in this….
Snopsing Snopes
| Claim |
| In August 2021, Snopes’ co-founder and CEO David Mikkelson was revealed to be a serial plagiarizer, sloppily violating copyrights of other publications in an attempt to make the site look extremely proactive in uncovering news. |
| Rating |
 True |
To the Moon
I Look At a Lot of Articles to find just the right mix for each weekly This is True column. Naturally, the vast majority are discarded, and I have to tell you about one that didn’t make the cut. It has a lot to do with “cognitive processes” …aka thinking.
Facebook Accused Me of Hate Speech — and I Appealed (Twice!)
I Am Guilty of posting “Hate Speech” on social media …according to Facebook’s algorithms and whoever (or whatever) reviewed that declaration when I appealed.
The Exploding Whale, 50 Years Later
The First-Ever Viral Video (which, naturally, was of the “weird news” variety!) was shot a half century ago today. This is its story, with a higher resolution video than most have ever seen.
The Streisand Effect
Two recent This is True stories demonstrate the “Streisand effect,” and this page brings those two stories together (plus a third from 5 years ago), and then leads to more commentary on the “effect.”
Let’s start with the first of the two recent stories, from True’s 8 December 2019 issue:
The Core of the Educational Problem
The Degradation of Education continues. Last night, after slapping my forehead when reading a news story, I Tweeted (and “Facebooked”), “Rolling my eyes at inept news reporters: It’s ‘strong-arm robbery,’ not ‘strong armed robbery,’ which means the armed robbery was strong. Example: [link removed: no longer online].”
009: The Headlines Lied
In This Episode: There’s a lot of talk about accuracy in the media these days, up to and including frequent accusations that the mainstream press publishes “fake news.” The real “fake news” isn’t what you may think — and it starts even before you click.
Online News: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
Sometimes I Smile, Sometimes I Roll My Eyes: About the news business, that is. As a news commentary column, news is, of course, the road this publication drives on. Here’s what I mean.
A Very Bad Gamble
I have a little bit to say about a story this week, so let me start with that story — from the 26 November 2017 issue: