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View all search resultsNo news is good news, reinterpreted
Most of us have heard the phrase âNo news is good news
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M
ost of us have heard the phrase 'No news is good news.' Generally it means that a lack of news at least means nothing is going wrong. In a time when the world is potentially facing an Ebola outbreak, two terrorist groups that are the de-facto rulers of nations (ISIS and Boko Haram), a worsening standoff in Ukraine, a possible 'Grexit' from the euro zone, a weak world economy and global climate change among other things, this phrase could not be truer.
The mix of Taiwan's tabloid news culture and online 'real time' news reports has, however, given a particular meaning to the phrase ' nowadays 'good news' (for the outlets at least) can truly be created from no news.
The Taiwanese media previously gave us an example of 'no news is good news' in 2013 with a 'real time' report on how a starlet was gladly surprised by the discovery of NT$200 (US$6.35) in the pocket of a long unworn jacket.
The report was widely ridiculed as 'garbage news' for covering an event utterly unrelated to the public interest. Yet as Peng Wen-cheng, a journalism professor at National Taiwan University pointed out, this piece of news marked a 'visionary' moment. It grabbed the attention of online news readers by catering to the netizen culture of 'yawning over national news reported in all seriousness while instead focusing on the trivial stories of private individuals.'
This report, consisting of only 83 Chinese characters, came for almost no cost as its content was fetched from the celebrity's blog. The fact that it attracted over 300,000 clicks on the first day of its release alone and that people still remember it highlights the success of the piece in a purely business sense.
People might be ridiculing the 'rubbish media' and their 'copycat reporters' but as long as they are still reading them, their ridicule is in fact a compliment. For today's Taiwanese media, the only bad publicity is no publicity at all.
Two years on and the media has only gotten bolder with its treatment of non-news. An example would be a report on Sunday of a bed sheet theft at a laundromat. Again a piece of real-time news posted on a local newspaper's online platform, the report attracted eyeballs by highlighting the description of the owner as a 'hottie' and the thief a 'ugly man.'
To grab people's attention from the start, the headline cried 'Ugly man stole a pretty girl's bed sheet and took it home.' When they clicked on the news, readers would realise that the man ' seemingly with a fetish for women's bed sheets ' was just an ordinary thief who probably had no idea who he had stolen from.
Since the dawn of modern news many media outlets have resorted to speculation and sensationalism to boost readership. The advent of the 24-hour cable news cycle has pushed the 'everything goes for ratings' attitude to a whole new level. With the introduction of an endless 'real-time' online news platform, tabloids go yet further to turn everything into news so they can file a report every few minutes.
To turn mundane non-events into what are basically click traps, the media cater to every want and need of their target audience. Their arsenal includes keywords such as 'hottie,' celebrity names (mostly female, almost always come with a mention of their cup sizes), sensationalist words or terms with free use of exclamation marks (something like 'Ugly man steals a bed sheet from a pretty lady'), cheesy tearjerker lines or cute animals, netizen buzzwords and sometimes phrases taken directly from pornographic movies.
The latest invention is to actually include a blank in the headline ' say, 'Hillary said Obama is a...' ' creating a headline that is blatantly designed not to inform but to force people to click on it.
In the book Think Like A Freak, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner explain that Nigerian scammers make their emails ridiculously obvious and full of typos deliberately in order to screen out people not gullible enough for their time. Perhaps the caterers of non-news are employing a similar tactic.
With their obvious 'garbage news,' they are not only appeasing their audience but are also screening for readers bored/gullible/silly enough to feed on their news. Sadly as the increasing popularity of this kind of news has shown, their target audience base might be a big one. (***)
