A virulent and aggressive strain of brain fungus has infected American newspaper executives, causing them to say and believe fantastical things while expecting those statements to be taken seriously, health officials confirmed this week.
The fungus — encephalagic locos deleriumus, or "bullshit virus" — was once thought to be limited to low-level politicians and vacation timeshare salesmen. However, this week's announcement of drastic changes to the New Orleans Times-Picayune and other Advance Publications papers was the final evidence officials needed that the bullshit virus had infected a new population.
"We've suspected this for a long time," said Earnest Chambers, an epidemiologist with the National Institutes of Health. "When executives began cutting costs and trimming staff, they would talk as though they're boosting the fortunes of their papers. That flies in the face of reality, and yet it seemed they genuinely believed their ridiculous statements."
A memo from T-P publisher Ashton Phelps Jr. provides the best example.
In it, he says the now-daily paper will switch to publishing only three days a week, but that the newspaper will be "more robust." He also wrote that to "accelerate the digital growth of NOLA media group," there will be "a reduction in the size of the workforce."
Lisa Kanahi, who leads a quarantine strike team for the Centers for Disease Control, said she started preparing for a massive quarantine of newsroom leaders when the leaked memo hit the Internet Thursday.
"He's clearly delusional, and he's not alone," Kanahi said. "If you publish less, how is that more robust? How can you grow a media group while cutting staff?"
"It takes a team of bullshit-infected people to come up with something that big. We're worried this could take down the entire news industry."
A quarantine site hasn't been selected yet, she said.
This week's newspaper news wasn't the first time health officials saw evidence of the bullshit virus.
When the Las Vegas Review-Journal laid off nearly two dozen journalists in August 2011, Publisher Bob Brown stated that the cuts were "about growing this enterprise." He promised that "our advertisers and readers will see absolutely no impact at all," a statement that managed to be crazy and insulting at the same time.
The key is that the executives were not "spinning" the announcement, said Chambers. They actually believed that gutting an operation would help it grow. A mind free of the bullshit virus would be able to say something as simple as, "This is a tough move, but our troubled balance sheet demands it."
As for how they became infected, researchers think that the bullshit virus has lain dormant at newspapers for decades.
Journalists, after all, spend a lot of time around low-level politicians and could easily pick up the fungus from them. Due to the toxic levels of bullshit flowing through newsrooms, however — from phone calls, faxes, e-mails, reader comments and upper management — rank-and-file newshounds have developed a powerful immunity to bullshit.
News executives, however, have been away from that bullshit stew for a long time, and many never spent time in a newsroom, advancing instead from advertising or other sections. Without that built-up immunity, it was only a matter of time before they fell prey to the bullshit virus.
There is no known cure. A possible solution, at least temporarily, is to put more journalists in senior positions.
"They are infected," cautioned Kanahi. "But they know bullshit when they see it."
