Louis C.K.: Internet News Is Heroin

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If you’re an avid watcher of Louis C.K.‘s Horace and Pete than you also get to enjoy his weekly emails which sometimes contain some of C.K.’s thoughts on the world.  If you’re not, then you missed a chance to hear what he had to say about the internet and news today, after reflecting about the coverage of the terror attacks in Brussels this week. Just a few weeks ago, C.K.’s Horace and Pete reminder email made news all over the world after he compared Trump to Hitler.  This week it will be interesting to see how many internet outlets pick up his comparison of Internet news to heroin.

“Internet news is heroin. Newspaper news is nutrition. That’s MY view,” he wrote.

“The truth is that the news, if you’re really paying attention, is complex and boring,” he said.  Newspapers, he said, are nutrition.  “The news paper limited space” he said, and because it’s not “immediate” they have time to get it right.  Internet news, by contrast, is “immediate, brash and badly reported.”

CK’s thought of the week seems to have been inspired by the new-ish ad model of advertisers sponsoring individual clips of video, usually without curation.  So the laws of randomness result in you getting some horrific bit of news be brought to you, at times, by cheery ads or ads that seem even more inappropriate than most.

“When the news used to be a single broadcast that you would watch on television, with commercial breaks. There was a sense that these companies bought advertising to pay for the news to be brought to you,” C.K. explained. “But now with sponsorship of individual moments of suffering, presented to comfortable gawking consumers, it feels like someone died in a far away place (so you don’t have to!) and now you get to watch. And it’s brought to you by Geico!”

Check out this week’s Horace and Pete, with the benefit of no commercials or interruptions. Go to louisck.com for episode 9 of Horace and Pete with this week’s guest stars, Ann Carr and John Sharian.

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