It’s absolutely incredible: there are at least twice as many ads on American telly as there are in Britain, and it’s absolutely horrible. The ads are all for cars, beer, shitty PG-13 movies, cheap plentiful food, crash diet fads (the latter two not being entirely unrelated), lawyers, new electronic gizmos like the iPhone, pills of a million different varieties you can pop for any kind of dysfunction (these ads having a hilarious side-effects warning voiceover twice as long as that of the supposed health-giving benefits of the pill in question which totally kill the pill-euphoria effect, but in a litigation-ligature society like America the pharmaceutical companies have to cover their arses)…and on and on and on, an endless vapid parade of muppets, morons and motherfuckers and has-beens and wannabes and never-gonnabes trying to sell you stuff you will never need or use, an insane dollar-glazed-eye hypermarketplace that never stops day and night and day. And it really wears on your nerves after…well, after about a day or so of arriving in the country.

The Americans just aren’t like the Scots, that’s for sure.

(Don’t I sound like quite the gawping look-electricity-ain’t-it-purty-but-kinda-scary-too redneck that Americans sometimes assume I am because I come from a country outside theirs but, you know, I speak very good English?!)

What I have found weird too is the magazines and newspapers you can buy over here, shite like the National Enquirer that everybody knows is full of utter garbage ie ‘George W Bush Is A Sane And Reasoned Man With Excellent Internationalist Diplomacy Skills’)…but which still sells like hotcakes. Pure putrid pathological paralogical garbage…but it still is pumped out, once again day and night and day…and it all it does is serves to muddy the country’s waters psychologically. And oftentimes this is done on purpose.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the British media is shite as well (as it will be to a greater or lesser degree all over the world, but these are the two places whose media I have most experience of), it’s just that the American media operates on a vastly larger and more slick professional level of shite, much like how New Labour shite and spin is modelled these days on Republican shite and spin. I’m not trying to say Scotland/the UK in general is a much better place than America (would still be living there were it the case), it’s just that the bullshit is so thick here that you can’t help but notice the smell two seconds after getting off the plane. And some of it is just so sick and insidious and evil it makes you want to vomit. You hardly EVER hear about ANY other country apart from America in the news over here, and it’s so isolationist it’s scary; you would almost think that this country was the only one with soldiers dying in Iraq for the complete lack of media coverage the other countries over there receive in the U.S. media.

Which is what makes books like ‘It’s Not News, It’s Fark’ so relevant and necessary. Drew Curtis started the website www.fark.com in 1999 after a few beers. It initially started out when he found himself emailing weird and wonderful news stories to friends, then deciding he could do this job far better by establishing a website and just directing interested parties to the updated version. 8 years on, it now registers 3.5 to 5 million hits a month, “depending on whether or not he posts links about Britney Spears not wearing underwear.” (And that’s another aspect of the American media-overload-whiplash psyche: Parasite Hiltonanist celebritneys are frighteningly and fascistically worshiped like royalty over here, because the lucky Americans don’t have their own worthless leech hereditary ovelords to revere) And it’s people like Curtis who give you some vague, probably ill-founded hope that the American media could have some vague semblance of logic pounded into its empty ad-filled head.

Reading thousands upon thousands of news stories to post on his website, Curtis started to notice clearly-definable patterns in the (dis)information being provided. What he noticed was that most of the stuff being thrust in front of our eyes and ears by the media had practically no substance to it, and he named this garbage ‘fark’ (which he says is either a bastardization of an expletive or a misspelling he did while drunk) and started analyzing it and mocking it mercilessly on his site, being cheered on by his funny, intelligent farking fans. And what kinds of patterns and I talking about? Well, try these on for size:

Media Fearmongering
Unpaid Placement Masquerading as Actual Article
Headline Contradicted by Actual Article
Equal Time For Nutjobs
The Out-of-Context Celebrity Comment
Seasonal Articles
Media Fatigue
Lesser Media Space Fillers

What Curtis does with each of these trends is devotes a chapter to them, to show how most of the journalism being done by journalists, no matter be they on TV or the net, is not actually journalism at all, or anything near being worthy of the appellation. As he points out, even on a slow news day the media still needs to sell advertising to continue going (and generate massive profits for the dubious-agenda-driven pricks who own it), so it manufactures a lot of worthless puff-piece fluff that goes onto the wire as ‘real’ news and purposefully misleads the public about a subject or the reason for the contents of an ‘article’.

‘Fark’ shows how much of what is put out there by the media is often just slipshod cut-and-paste horseshit, just how virulent these often erroneous, or just plain made-up, articles can be, and the implications of this for our understanding of a subject being ‘reported’ on. If one media outlet prints or screens a piece others will often just follow lemming-like over the disinformation cliff (ironically, Fark is now a much-respected-and-copied news source for the mainstream media in America, though I'd never heard of the site before reading this book, which I chanced across at the local library), assuming that because somebody else printed or screened it something that it must be true. And this often proves to be absolutely, insidiously wrong. Curtis also demonstrates how supposedly bona-fide pieces of ‘news’ can be nothing but disguised product placement slipped past lazy journalistic eyes by the manufacturers of the product being discussed. He discusses, in illuminating detail, the stages of media over-coverage of certain events, which may not even really be newsworthy in the first place.

And this is not even half of what the writer does in this book. He joins media dots that some of us may have occasionally connected, but his uncanny eye for trends and bluff and bluster and bullshit really makes starkly obvious just how lazy most of the media is and just how stupid they assume we are in slurping down their shit like ever-hungry corpulent coprophiles at their ever-flowing electronic shit buffet. And you know, I personally, as an intelligent, reflective person really, really resent it. Then again, it’s not being put out for intelligent reflective people, and I don’t really fit any specific demographic, so…what do I count anyway?

I count the ways I’m getting shafted and get more and more angry by the day and night.

If this review makes the book sound like some dour, dry work of polysyllabic academia, please let me disavow you of that notion. Curtis presents the excellent, insightful analyses of the media in an everyman voice, which is often very funny, and he has an eye for the absurd and surreal that keeps you turning page after page and keeps illuminating flashes of new-brainpath synaptic lightning crashing and crackling through your head. William S Burroughs said that you can’t tell somebody something they don’t already know as they won’t have any commerce of ideas with you if they don’t on some level agree with you or recognize your message, and I think the reason this book comes across as well as it does, or did at least for me personally, is because the author says things that we’ve all cynically thought or noticed before and forces our thoughts around that subject to focus for a bit. We probably have not had the time to totally think through what he is talking about, or the time to write about it due to work or family commitments or whatever, but…Curtis is absolutely right, right on down the line 100% in this book and I wholeheartedly applaud him for it.

Curtis’s agenda is sound, full of both intelligence and don’t-play-me-for-a-fucking-sucker anger and indignation. He realizes how sloppy, stupid, or just plain propaganda-propelled journalism is damaging the fabric of our society and says so in a simple and accessible and reasoned manner. His voice is occasionally a bit adolescent, and this can be slightly grating. In talking about how the media seems to only want to cover missing white women, he talks of their fetish for ‘hot missing white chicks’. Which, judging by the fact that at least some of these women will genuinely, unfortunately, end up dead, is a somewhat sleazy, sexist, adolescent yuk-yuk way of talking about the subject (although I could suppose he could argue it’s the media’s agenda and he’s only naming and shaming it). But even in this he is making a serious point, and you can let occasional lapses of taste like this slip.

In summing up: I would wholeheartedly recommend this book who wants to gain some insight into the capitalist-smoke-and-mirrors maze that constitutes the American media and, by extension, much of the world’s media methodology too; after all, you can read American news websites anywhere in the world, and America, and American media, helps shape the world, for better or for worse or perverse. So getting an eagle-eye view of some of the crap it pulls (I found myself looking at stories on the net after reading this book and just going yeah, that fits the ‘lesser media space filler’ template, or the ‘equal time for nutjobs’ template, or…whatever lazy bullshit archetype Curtis had so unerringly nailed in his fine book) is extremely useful. In a time of electronic disinformation superhighway overload like we are in now, we need all the analytical help we can get, and people like Drew Curtis should be applauded for their vigilance and media-warning skills.

So what template would this review fall under, Drew? And where’s that money you said you’d give me for writing this?