Americans prefer Miley to Syria stories by huge number

[cali]

You probably already sensed that media coverage of Miley Cyrus' shenanigans would be more popular with Americans than stories about mass murder in Syria and the possible U.S. intervention there.

But someone has actually calculated exactly how much more popular Miley is than Syria: 12 times more popular. It's another one of those signs that suggests...well, something about the state of our culture.

A new survey by Outbrain, a leading "content discovery platform" on the Web, tracked traffic data from its network of 100,000 publishers and major news organizations and found that Americans viewed 12 times as many pages about Miley-the-twerker as they did about Syria-the-damned. New York magazine's popular fashion blog, The Cut, summed it up.

This disparity is in spite of the fact that hundreds of Syrians, including more than 400 kids, were recently gassed to death, apparently by their own government, and despite the fact that more than twice as many news stories about Syria have been published for every one about Miley in recent days.

<snip>

In fact, Miley trumps Syria in every other country in the Outbrain network except Syria-supporter Russia, where interest was about even, and Israel, where next-door-neighbor Syria commands more attention for obvious reasons.

<snip>

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2013/09/09/americans-prefer-miley-stories-to-syria-stories-by-huge-number/2789451/

[Reiyuki]

1. Orwell already had a word for it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolefeed

'Prolefeed' is a Newspeak term in the novel 1984 by George Orwell. It was used to describe the deliberately superficial literature, movies and music that were produced by the Ministry of Truth, to keep the people content and to prevent them from becoming too knowledgeable. The ruling Party believes that too much knowledge could motivate the proles to rebel against them.

[Fantastic Anarchist]

2. Huxley's world.

We're morons.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

3. Blurred Red Lines n/t