It's nice to see some things don't change

We were checking out the site for another of those blog award contests last night when we came across a site, previously unknown to us, dedicated to something called a Fark. The term I hadn't heard before; the entity it describes is, unfortunately, all too familiar. A Fark is a filler story used by the news media to fill space when they have nothing else to run. Farks (now that I know what to call them) bug the livin' bejeezes out of me, for the simple reason that there usually is news out there; it just is news that is happening in some other place and is therefore apparently not considered to be of interest to the navel-contemplating American news consumer. Thus, I was glad to see that somebody was calling attention to the fact that a whole lotta nuthin' gets passed off as news in the MSM, even if that somebody would seem to have way too much time on his hands.

I bring this up because it is thanks to this blog that we found a fascinating item from Pravda. Back in the bad old Soviet days, Pravda had a reputation for, shall we say, stretching the truth a little to suit the ends of the state. I'm not sure for whom they're stretching it these days, but it doesn't appear that glasnost altered their old habits any.

According to the Pravda opinion piece, it wasn't that mean-spirited slur against the Rutgers women's basketball team that got decrepit shock jock-turned-news talk moderator Don Imus fired. What really happened was that Imus (who, truth be told, hasn't struck me as being especially with it in an awfully long time--and I've been aware of him since the '70s) threatened to reveal "what he knew" about government conspiriacies leading to the 9/11 attacks. So naturally, rather than having him offed as any sensible totalitarian regime with ugly secrets to hide might have done, they created a media scandal to have him humiliated and deposed from his mike. Convincing, eh?

We haven't issued an Order of the Tinfoil Hat in a while, so perhaps this is a sign for us to get back on the ball with that program. This story is so lame that it seems there ought to be a special device to go with the hat, but I'm still too flabbergasted to try to think of one. One Hat then, to Sorcha Faal,the author of this bit of investigative reporting. If Christo and Jeanne Claude aren't too busy right now, perhaps they'd consider a project Reynolds wrapping the Pravda offices in Moscow. Shiny side out, of course.