Fires Ravage Oklahoma City, Texas Towns

past tense followed by -ing participles for color, is the template for disaster crap

the story is produced with one thing in mind : how many eyeballs can we get to read this

advertisers buy eyeballs

if you want men, crash photos page 4 does it, but it turns off a larger audience, women

women : this can happen to your house !

a fairly large number of houses don't burn up every year, a statistic omitted. probably yours included. we have to send reporters to find even these.

in general : the flavor of moral disgust with news comes from making somebody's problems into entertainment, trading on it ; which happens to coincide with soap opera.

women's interest in complex relationships, soul-searching and eternal frustration is helpful in their own neighborhoods, where it may do some good ; parasitic on that virtue is the virtual neighborhood of any-disaster-anywhere-brought-to-you-for-engrossment, where it does no good at all except to entertain the woman herself.

These women now edit the mainstream news by their preferences, being the biggest bloc of audience available

how to fight this? somehow make the calculation of audience obvious to the audience.

OKLAHOMA CITY -- Grassfires raged across the dry southern prairie Sunday, burning homes in Oklahoma City, destroying two small towns in Texas, and creating patchworks of flames as burning embers were blown by the gusting winds.