by Douglas Slayton
When you meet some person with whom you have nothing to talk about, invariably you will talk about the weather. When you talk about the weather lately all anyone ever wants to talk about is El Nino—partly because the media is telling you that it is important and partly because no one knows what it is. Lucky for you on both counts that you clicked some anonymous link that someone has shared with you for this piece because I will now explain El Nino. And maybe that stranger will think you are cool and call you back and maybe someday you will tell your children about how you met their other parent because you read a super informative article on a blog that otherwise actively repulsed you because of its continued lack of editorial direction.
When you meet some person with whom you have nothing to talk about, invariably you will talk about the weather. When you talk about the weather lately all anyone ever wants to talk about is El Nino—partly because the media is telling you that it is important and partly because no one knows what it is. Lucky for you on both counts that you clicked some anonymous link that someone has shared with you for this piece because I will now explain El Nino. And maybe that stranger will think you are cool and call you back and maybe someday you will tell your children about how you met their other parent because you read a super informative article on a blog that otherwise actively repulsed you because of its continued lack of editorial direction.
Haha. Just kidding, no one will ever love you. Let’s get to the real reason you are here though: El Nino.
We live in an exciting time. The news, like your depressed friend you keeps messaging you on Facebook when you are trying to sleep in preparation for your big quarterly financial meeting in the morning, never sleeps. Because it never sleeps, there has to be a constant stream of content. But most of the time there is not much worthy of reportage. The news wants you to think that we live in exciting times, but really we do not. Everything is boring. You really should spend less time reading things on the internet and just live your life.1 In order to support the new 24 hour news cycle, the big wigs in New York sell all that advertising time so that you will know about the latest toothpaste breakthroughs. In order to fill this space between commercials, news anchors are trained to improvise breaking “facts”. It has lead to recent trending topics like the “election”. Easily, the biggest story to come from this practice is El Nino. It began as a simple weather broadcast in upstate New York, but spun out of control when a different weather reporter from Boston saw the broadcast while eating a burrito and said, “I can do better than that!” And did he ever. This oneupsmanship has lead to a rash of news broadcasts warning the coasts of a storm, the likes of which have not been seen in several decades (two, two decades).
Where it is undeniable that this is a BIG storm, it is smaller than the secret storms that the media has been ignoring for centuries (two, two centuries). As much as I would like to discuss the media ignoring the real issues, like other big storms and littering, I can simply say this is a case of the media bias towards certain stories over others.
This leads into why no one knows anything about El Nino: because it is a fabrication. It is a series of loosely connected storms the media is wanting to be a bigger deal than it is, so they can charge more for the advertising during the reporting.
This is a clear cut case of the media using its power to fill their pockets with gold.
Douglas Slayton is Professor Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.
Douglas Slayton is Professor Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.
1 Editor's note: this is not true. Your life is incredibly boring and the internet is infinitely more interesting. Fuck you if you think you're too good for the internet. -CA↩
EDITORS NOTE FOR THE FUCKING WIN! HAHAHA
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