R.I.P. Batboy

[mikeschmike]

http://newsbloggers.aol.com/2007/07/...00010000000001

Posted Jul 24th 2007 8:58AM by Ben Greenman
Filed under: Scandal, Media, Bizarre

Some people say that they go to the supermarket for food. Those people are called "liars."

Most people, if you dig down deep, go to the supermarket for tabloids, and not just the glossy celebrity magazines that have multiplied like gremlins in the last ten years. I mean real, honest-to-badness tabloids, the newspapers for which truth and responsibility and even reality are other people's hang-ups.

And now, the world is poorer, thanks to the news this week that American Media will cease publication of one of the great pieces of trash this country has ever produced: the Weekly World News. (Read more about it here and here.)


Published since 1979, the WWN has staunchly refused, for the most part, to tell us about Lindsay or Paris or Britney, instead opting for stories about aliens, Satan, giant pigs rampaging through the Georgia woods, Nostradamus-like prophets, time travel, and, of course, Bat Boy. In an increasingly frightening world, the Weekly World News provided regular -- you might even say weekly -- respite in the form of pedal-to-the-metal stupidity. It's too bad that WWN didn't break the story of its own demise, because then we would know that it wasn't true.