The British Lolcat Broadcasting Corporation

I typed "news" into my web browser and this popped up as my top interest-grabbing hit from BBC World News: "Little girl's stolen puppy returned by remorseful thieves" - and I swear to that idiotic primitive superstition the rest of you call "god" that when I visited BBC's site to grab the link for this post, the very next hit after it was "Australian jockey Caboche suspended for punching horse."

Flying Spaghetti Monster, give me strength.

You morons!
... Ok, I suppose that second story's so close to a literal "man bites dog" headline that journalists might feel tempted to play it up, but it's still not close enough. If he'd instead turned around backwards and kicked the horse, then I might be interested, and even then only as a one-liner. The real issue is that this bull horseshit popped up as "world" news. It's not. It's really, really not... None of us over here in the platypus-free world gives a crap what Australian jockeys do. Nobody in Estonia or Paraguay or Asshead, Arkansas has ever woken up with a burning desire to plumb the mysteries of ethical conduct among diminutive down-under horse-humpers. Trust me on this one.

But a story about a cute puppy? Is this seriously a BBC World News article or am I being trolled? Is this shit seriously being promoted front and center on the world stage while in a tiny sidebar wait tiny mentions of Trump visiting China to kiss the asses of the most prolific human rights offenders in the world? While news of rampant worldwide tax fraud hides meekly in the corner?

Yes, I know "Mittens the kitten" segments have been used to lampoon reporters for over a century, from at least the time of Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. I'm in my thirties and I've never known any news media, whether in print, radio, tv, internet, blimp, whatever, to actually deliver the sort of sober, factual and above all relevant reporting on which we should all be able to depend. However, it's gotten much worse.

For one thing, "Mittens the kitten" used to ridicule local small-town news segments, not international ones. For another, news media fluff pieces have only grown more ludicrous with the onset of the internet, because now the public can make its own fluff. We're self-fluffing! Anyone who wants to know about Australian jockeys can visit those jockeys' Facebook pages. You want editorials about vampire-themed role-playing video games or anime or comics or the ethics of sniping in online shooters? I provide those right here on this blog! If this is what it takes to convince you, I will go into Dwarf Fortress and somehow name one of my dwarves' pet kittens "Mittens" then have a kobold steal it. I can write that article, and these half-dozen chumps giving me hits on the blog will actually read it. Amazing! - and amazingly enough, it doesn't take a multibillion-dollar international investigative conglomerate to produce that story.

BBC News, of all things, used to at least maintain some dim pretense of respectability, bit o' the old stiff opper lip, wot? When did the BBC grow content with becoming a Monty Python parody of itself? Do you know why everyone stopped reading the news? Because you, all of you from Los Angeles to Moscow, stopped doing your jobs in the late 1800s. If I can replace you by typing "funny cat videos" into Youtube, you don't get to whine about the public's apathy or low sales. You do not deserve your jobs.