Wednesday, August 17, 2005
All right, if someone deserves a tip, if they really put forth an effort, I'll give them something a little something extra.
This article is a microcosm of what's wrong with the media these days. For those too lazy to read the article, it's about a 19-year old waitress in Sweden who had a customer give her a Porsche as a tip.
If you were to look at the headline, you would assume that the waitress was the recipient of a sportscar worth at least $50,000. Instead, it turns out that she got a 1979 junked out Porsche worth a whopping $4,000. It would have been a better tip if she had gotten a new Hyundai, but that wouldn't have made international news. This, by itself, insults the intelligence of the reader, but the news agency lamely attempts to sell the article by adding a COMPLETELY UNRELATED picture of some guy getting into a much newer Porsche (which is like a newspaper printing a story on some minor league baseball player hitting a grandslam with a picture of Barry Bonds next to it having the caption "Baseball player hitting grandslam"), and by finishing the article with the following gratuitous statement:
Not that I care or anything.
If you were to look at the headline, you would assume that the waitress was the recipient of a sportscar worth at least $50,000. Instead, it turns out that she got a 1979 junked out Porsche worth a whopping $4,000. It would have been a better tip if she had gotten a new Hyundai, but that wouldn't have made international news. This, by itself, insults the intelligence of the reader, but the news agency lamely attempts to sell the article by adding a COMPLETELY UNRELATED picture of some guy getting into a much newer Porsche (which is like a newspaper printing a story on some minor league baseball player hitting a grandslam with a picture of Barry Bonds next to it having the caption "Baseball player hitting grandslam"), and by finishing the article with the following gratuitous statement:
The incident is reminiscent of the 1994 Hollywood movie "It Could Happen To You" starring Nicolas Cage and Bridget Fonda, in which a waitress becomes a millionaire when her customer offers to share his lottery ticket with her in lieu of a tip.Please. This guy pawned off a rundown old car that had probably been darkening his driveway under a moldy tarp for years, and now some reporter wants to compare it to a multi-million dollar tip. News sucks.
Not that I care or anything.
Centinel 11:58 PM #