Talk:Junk food news

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The top ten junk food news items for 2000 were:

1. Survivor (television series)
2. Elian Gonzalez
3. The millionaire bride (Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?)
4. Britney Spears
5. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
6. Whitewater and the private lives of the Clintons
7. Napster
8. Tie: The Ellen Degenerese and Anne Heche break up & JonBenét Ramsey
9. Rickey Martin's sexuality
10. Tie: Brad Pitt's wedding & Dot-coms and IPOs

I removed this because plenty of people think at the very least Whitewater, Napster and the dotcoms are valid news stories with adequate reason to be on CNN. Also, is "Junk Food News" always capitalized, or should it be at junk food news? Tokerboy

I agree that the list doesn't belong in the wikipedia. It isn't relevant to me.

The junk food factor of Whitewater and the private lives of the Clintons was that it dragged on so long with no result when there was soooo much other scandel surrounding the Clintons. European sensibilies laughed themselves to tears and then they cried over fundamentalist puritanical America's obsession with their presidents sex game cum-staining of an

adult womans dress. There are serious problems in America that one network could have got audience but no every single channel and show had crap on about complicated finacial shenagins instead of slam dunk political corruption.

After Enron don't some dot-com bubble economy profits look like a RICO case. Think about some of the scams or smoke and mirror morality. The rot in America starts at the top and continues down till it is stopped by the fifth check and balance of the American Constitution.

Napster is very important indeed; but the way the story was framed, has us celebrating Mickey Freedom Day with non violent resistance, civil disobediance, Satyagraha and down right uncivil disobedience. the spectrum of opposition is huge the responses will be diverse. I heard one guy wanted to kill Sonny Bono. User:Two16

This article can never be NPOV. I vote for its deletion. -- Zoe

I disagree. Googling reveals 2,640 hits for "junk foods news" (with quotation marks). Many of them seem to about actual news related to junk foods, but some of the biggest hits are Project Censored and related ideas. It seems to be a term actually used by actual, non-insane people, so I think it deserves to exist. A list like what I removed is here inherently POV, and no such list should exist, but the idea, I think, should still be explained. Maybe if we take something pretty obviously junk food news, that even people interested in it agree is pretty irrelevant (like Cruise/Kidman), we can describe what is junk food news and why people still pay attention to "news" magazines that are dedicated more or less solely to it. In any case, it's a real term... I don't see why it should be deleted. Tokerboy

So, Toker, please explain how it can be NPOV. One man's junk food is another man's worthwhile information. -- Zoe, who is really unhappy right now.

Of course, but that's true of a lot of things. One man's punk band is another man's sell-outs, one man's science is another man's Satan-inspired trash... All I'm saying is that it's a real term used to describe real things in a complex way and is therefore worthy of an encyclopedia article. Tokerboy

Whether it is or isn't, it isn't your call to take it off the Votes for deletion page. -- Zoe

I never took it off Votes for Deletion. According to history it was the Cunctator. Tokerboy

Yes Zoe and you're not going to be able to get rid of this article simply because it stretches your capacity to understand the wikipedia. If we stopped writing articles every time that somebody felt uncomfortable with the communities ability to write NPOV we would never have articles on any contravercial topic. Just think of abortion and SUV. Try taking a look at where an article links (or is linked from) and you will have a much better idea about its validity. Google is good but it only catelogues what people have made web sites about. Think before you reflexively crap on something you don't understand. If you want to learn go to votes for deletion are see my specific comments there. Also actually read NPOV all the way to the end. Then check out Jimbo's principles also on this site. Rise and shine sleepy head! Two16

Look. I put this on votes for deletion, which allows us to discuss it. If it's the consensus that it stay, fine, though I would disagree with the consenus. But it's not somebody else's right to arbitrarily remove it from the votes for deletion page without discussion.

This article does average more than 50 hits a day, which is more than most of the articles I work on. I got here by following a link in Wikipedia:Fringe theories. I would think it's OK to keep it. -- Margin1522 (talk) 17:30, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

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Would yo-yo news be considered JFN? I thought about the stock market and similar. For economics and others with a personal interest, it's important to always be updated.

Tags

I've tagged this for references and OR. In particular, the list of examples needs to be sourced. Dhaluza 10:17, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

This article was a close paraphrase of an original article by Jensen (which can also be found on the web, although I didn't cite it for copyright reasons). So I put it back into Jensen's words, added footnotes, and removed the references and OR tags. --Margin1522 (talk) 17:26, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Carl Jensen

Does this Carl Jenson have an Wikipedia-article. And if yes, which Carl Jensen is he? --80.109.39.94 (talk) 17:56, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

Reaction?

I'd be surprised if there were no critics of this concept. Surely someone has pointed out that the first duty of a newspaper is to turn a profit, so that they can stay in business. A newspaper that's closed cannot do "hard-hitting investigative journalism". A newspaper that keeps the money flowing by running a few pages of popular fluff to pay the bills can also do investigative journalism. WhatamIdoing (talk) 09:32, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment.

Title of the article? Confusing

The phrase "junk food news" reads to me as "news about junk food". I would expect to read an article about reporters and magazines and newspapers etc who take it is their job to cover the vast junk food industry (the fast food restaurants, big corporations that push sugar bombs in the supermarket aisles, etc.). It's hard to get past that immediate reaction to what the article will be about to see that, in fact, that's not what it is about. Rather, it is about junk journalism or junk news. I advocate changing the title of the article to either of those. I've also done some internet googling to see if outside sources frequently refer to this type of journalism as "junk food news" and I'm not really finding a lot to correspond to that. Novellasyes (talk) 15:24, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

I quite agree. I think the article should be called 'junk news' or 'junk journalism,' of course it should be explained that it is derived from Jensons longer 'junk food news' but I agree that it is kind of confusing for people. RekNek42 (talk) 07:12, 24 May 2022 (UTC)

I also agree that the term "Junk food news" is historic and not a current usage. I propose we change the article title to "Junk news". Grorp (talk) 03:37, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

@Novellasyes and RekNek42: I just read most of the article. It looks like as of 24 March 2022‎, RekNek42 started to add content to this page. Beforehand, the page was about "Junk food news". The content RekNek42 added was about "Junk news" (a slightly different concept). I suppose, ideally, RekNek42 would have used the redirect Junk news and made it a full blown article with the Howard/Oxford content, rather than shoehorning it into Junk food news, but we have to work with what we see today.

Project Censored's definition of "junk food news" was more about non-essential crap that we shouldn't waste our time on (the counterpoint to media-censored content we never hear about), and that contrasts with Howard's/Oxford's definition of "junk news" which is about misleading, skewed and/or deliberately false news. Those two aren't the same terms.

The short term solution for this article would be to put "Junk food news" as a section of "Junk news" (a new name for this article). "Junk news" is such a common term nowadays and "junk food news" is not. I propose that we rename the page to "Junk news" and take the older content and put it in a section called "Junk food news", which is a subset of "Junk news".

Since Project Censored was still churning out content under the label of "Junk food news" as recently as 2019, we can't exactly call it historic. And I really don't think "Junk news" was spawned from "junk food news"; I think "junk" was just a normal adjective. There does seem to be a lot of crossover with "fake news", "false news" and perhaps other terms -- some of which have their own articles in Wikipedia. Even the Howard writings occasionally use the terms "junk news" and "fake news" interchangeably.

So, what say you two (Novellasyes for bringing up the topic and RekNek42 as the author of most of the new content)?

Grorp (talk) 03:04, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

This is a good distinction. Your point is that are three distinct things that could be meant by "junk food news": (1) News about food like this. (2) Pink-slime journalism. (3) News that is pointless. It isn't necessarily harmful in and of itself (whereas perhaps pink slime journalism is). It's the news equivalent of an empty calorie. "Non-essential crap we shouldn't waste our time on." Anyway, I agree with re-naming the article but now, having found that pink slime article, not sure how to balance a "junk news" article with that pink slime article. Novellasyes (talk) 13:08, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

@Novellasyes: It's now looking like the junk news info that was added by RekNek42 (who did the work as a student on a course and doesn't seem to have continued editing in Wikipedia) is sort of a WP:CONTENTFORK of the Fake news article. The Fake news article covers a lot of this stuff. Now I'm thinking 'merge' the additions to Fake news, but oh the work! Not something I want to do. And change the Junk news redirect to Fake news instead of Junk food news. Grorp (talk) 00:37, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

@Grorp: For sure, it would be a lot of work. More the work of making the right distinctions and associating those distinctions with the right descriptive phrases! I am going to think on this. Novellasyes (talk) 21:20, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

@Novellasyes: I compared RekNek42's additions against Fake news. Seems like most, if not all, of the concepts are included in that article. So I reverted this article back to its pre-WP:CONTENTFORK and reverted the Junk news redirect back to Fake news where it was previously. Grorp (talk) 00:22, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

You are the best!! Novellasyes (talk) 14:32, 27 October 2022 (UTC)