A Fark book seems like an odd proposition. In the Acknowledgments Drew Curtis thanks a friend who guided him to compromise with the publishers looking for a best-of Fark book. Curtis wanted to do a straight media critique, and what we get is a series of Fark articles that illustrate the principals of bullshit news.

Before digging too far into Curtis’ media critique, it's important to point out that this book is from 2007. It’s pre-Facebook, pre-Fake News, and from the era where blogs were starting to subvert the hold cable news had over the culture. The conclusion at the end is about how blogs were about to collapse the traditional role of the media, which was wrong only in the details, since most people's media diets were about to be fed almost exclusively through social media.

This book is an excellent media literacy primer, showing the patterns behind what stories get covered and why. You get a tour of the media’s worse tendencies, and it's oddly foretelling about why it's been so useless in the age of Trump. Learning how the press works to fill space and time can go a long way into understanding what stories exist simply to hijack your attention.

These rules used to apply to the kind of filler saved for slow news cycles, which is a bit of a nostalgic time. Now that every bit of news has to live next to every other thing on the internet competing for your attention, most likely in the same timeline. So while Curtis lays out the rules for how bullshit filler is written, almost all news now follows at least some of these rules to grab your attention.

In addition to giving you a basic primer on crap news, Curtis is also showing that we’ve been talking about news dying for over a decade now. Newspapers are collapsing, cable and television news is shouting at your parents and grandparents that the world is coming to kill them and steal their Social Security, and Facebook is telling us everyone we know is probably a fucking idiot. All that’s changed is every layer of the news business is making even less money, well except Facebook.

That’s because everything in this book works. The audience rewards crap news, whether smart aleck nerds mock it or not. There’s a whole passage about various outlets competing to get onto Fark, even going so far as to submit their own stories. It’s not that the media is clueless, they just understand all of our hand wringing is little more than lip service. It’s the intellectual equivalent of saying we need to eat less and exercise more. All the while, we’re crash dieting between binges on junk food. We know the right thing to do, but that isn’t easy or fun.

That may have gotten away from me there. Oh well, grab the Fark book for a great media 101 lesson. It’s missing YouTube charlatans, troll brigades, Reddit, and the myriad of other ways the media landscape has moved on in the intervening years. It’s far breezier than most academic books on the subject, which is crucial for a casual audience.