Whipped Cream Difficulties

Since we’re into October, I wonder if it is time to start rounding up candidates for the Dumbest Article Printed In a Large Circulation Publication In 2012.

I could go through my “stupid” tag, but most of those entries are for heroic individual acts of stupidity, and not articles from the mass media.

I could throw things open to my readers, but every time I do throw things open to my readers, I get, shall we say, a less than deafening response.

Then again, I can’t dance, and it is too wet to plow still, so….

…put your candidates for “Dumbest Article Printed In a Large Circulation Publication In 2012” into the comments, or email them to me at stainles at gmail dot com if you want to remain monogamous anonymous.

I do think we need some ground rules:

• Both traditional print and web-based publications are eligible.
• I will accept nominations of individual articles from Salon and Slate, but I will not accept nominations of either of those sites as a whole. I will also judge submissions from those two sites more harshly than I do submissions from other sources, as both sites already have a reputation for publishing articles of enormous stupidity; thus, I hold them to a higher standard than I do supposedly reputable mass media such as the LAT.
• I will accept nominations of individual articles from this site and the Saturday Dining Conspiracy web site, just to be fair.
• “UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.”

We’ve already got the LAT pot growers of the Emerald Triangle story to work with. (Though, on second thought, is that a stupid story, or a smart story about stupid people?)

I’ll add to the list this fine Salon article from January, which John Scalzi ably dissected. (“…the seven most damaging words in the English language for the reputation of any novelist might very well be ‘I just wrote an article for Salon.'”)

Any more entries? I’m sure I’m forgetting something, probably in Slate.

Edited to add: Thinking about it some more, I realized that I left the definition of “Large Circulation Publication” undefined. For example, does a professional writer’s personal blog that gets a lot of traffic count as a “Large Circulation Publication”? I think my answer to that is: you post ’em, I print ’em.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2012 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Clippings, Media, Stupid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.