Rottenchester

Here's my challenge to anyone defending the Shitty News: When's the last time you got a good laugh out of that rag? Think hard, now. I'll bet the answer for most of you is "never".

That's because Shitty News is the oracle for the slightly-out-of-mainstream but still comfortably liberal point of view. And, whatever else it might be, that viewpoint is politically correct and exceedingly humorless.

Let's take a recent cover story by Rochacha's heroine, Jennifer Loviglio: New battleground for human rights: the bathroom / Transgendered employees, acceptance, and corporate America.

That headline sounds like a Masters' Thesis, not a newspaper article.

ZZZZZZZZ.

Oops, I feel asleep at the keyboard reading it. Sorry. The jist of the story is apparently that boys who want to dress up like girls have a hard time choosing which toilet to squat on, people make fun of them, and some homophobes even attack them at work.

In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: Doh!

In addition to belaboring the painfully obvious, the story contains paragraph after paragraph of quotes from corporate flacks talking about how their beloved corporations are struggling mightily to overcome the tide of discrimination against transgendered folks, blah-blah-fucking-blah.

Look, Shitty News, you gotta realize something: the topics of your stories have been done to death. If you're going to cover a done-to-death topic, you need two things: an angle, and some humor.

Being an alternative newspaper should set you free! Every alternative newspaper I've seen in other cities come across like the writers had some fun producing that week's issue. Take a look at this week's edition of Seattle's alt-weekly, The Stranger. The cover story is on military recruitment, but the headline asks whether the promise of new dinette sets will make a difference. That's at least a different angle, and a bit funny. I'm intrigued. If Shitty News did the same story, the headline would be something like "The Shameful Come-On / Deceit, Deception and Military Recruitment".

The Stranger also has some great columnists, such as Dan Savage, who writes the sex column Savage Love. Savage is gay and has a sense of humor. He's also a liberal who isn't stifled by political correctness. For example, he used to ask everyone who wrote to him to begin their letter with the salutation "Hey, Faggot!" He did it to take the bite out of that word. Whether or not you agree with him, he's always interesting and usually funnier than hell. I could not imagine the current Shitty News having a sex column, much less one written by an irreverant guy like Savage.

Shitty News, you take yourself way, way too seriously. Loosen up and have some fun, for the love of Jebus. Start some fucking controversy! You'll know that you're successful when you piss off some of your readers. Right now, you're just boring them to tears.