Ads that look like news

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Ads that look like news

Friday, June 26th, 2009 | Media Behaving Badly |

The other week I mentioned seeing really bogus ads that looked like newspaper stories touting make money from home Google schemes. Wired has more: This Just In: Fake News Sites Are Great!.

There’s something icky about the fake news ads showing up on genuine news sites like Salon, Slate and Huffington Post. Are things really so bad that we’ll let scammers use the tropes of journalism to lure consumers into shady deals?

If I don’t like it, I can always quit the business and earn $1,700 a week posting links on Google. I know this because I recently saw this headline on Huffington Post: “How I Make $1700 a Week Posting Links on Google.”

The article is good, but the comments on fake news are even better:

“It turns out there’s a whole fake-media empire” Yeah ABC proved it last night. (run by the white-house)

When did HuffPo, Salon, or Slate become real news sites?

Wait a minute, Wired dot com is complaining about fake news sites? So all eight hundred of those recent “news stories” Wired dot com writes about how the new iPhone is transforming the entire universe and are the most important technological advance of the last two centuries are considered real journalism?? I’ve got to give it to Wired dot com for having enormous nerve to actually complain about web sites that have advertisements that look like news stories, considering that’s just about all you’ll find here.

If you like that last one you might enjoy Joel Johnson’s Awesome Gizmodo Rant.

And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose.

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