Journalism of the Absurd

Apparently, there has been a rash of food fights at Canadian schools. Some of them are documented on YouTube. You can imagine where this is heading. Today, I spoke with a reporter assigned to write a story about whether the press might be making too big a deal out of the fact that the food fights were planned online. He seemed to have a sense of humor about his assignment. I confessed that I don’t normally bother to read crime stories, much less ones concerning food fights in high schools. But still, this is one of those classic cases: if the kids had planned the food fight by speaking to one another, would there have been a rash of articles on the evils of conversation?