It’s official: US devotes more attention to Miley Cyrus than Syria
Sep 12, 2013, 6:30 AM | Updated: 8:37 am
On the day following MTV's Video Music Awards, Miley Cyrus related stories accounted for 12 percent of total page views in our country, while Syria stories accounted for only 1 percent. (Photo by Jeff Daly/Invision/AP, File)
(Photo by Jeff Daly/Invision/AP, File)
It’s difficult to be under any illusions that anyone is actually paying attention to stories like Syria or the budget crisis. America is just not into crises anymore – whether debt or military.
What America is into is Miley.
New York Magazine’s latest survey of news sources finds that Americans viewed twelve times as many pages about Miley Cyrus as they did about Syria — even though the news sources published 2.4 more articles on Syria than they did on America’s favorite Twerker.
According to Outbrain, a web company that tracks news links, so it can recommend stories you might like, in the three days surrounding Miley’s VMA performance and the Obama administration signaling its willingness to bomb Syria, they tracked 8,100 stories about Miley and over 19,000 stories about Syria.
Yet on the day following MTV’s Video Music Awards, Miley Cyrus related stories accounted for 12 percent of total page views in our country, while Syria stories accounted for only 1 percent.
You know who’s tried to do something about that? The Syrian Electronic Army, the group of hackers who support the Syrian resistance. A month ago, they hacked Outbrain and started directing Washington Post and CNN users to their own revolutionary website.
But that only lasted for about 30 minutes.
KIRO Radio’s Owen Murphy contributed to this report.
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