On New Year’s Day, Kanye West released a new song titled “Only One,” which features Paul McCartney. Recorded in Los Angeles, this song is the first of reportedly several collaborations between the rapper and the former Wings frontman for West’s upcoming album.
“Only One” is a ballad featuring West’s auto-tuned singing and McCartney on keyboards. According to a press release, the song was created during a brainstorming session with “McCartney improvising on the keyboards and Kanye vocally sketching and shaping ideas.”
The song is nice, but nothing earth-shattering, and wouldn’t be something to write about without the West and McCartney collaboration. Except a number of news outlets fell for a small number of tweets similar to this one:
Kanye has a great ear for talent. This Paul McCartney guy gonna be huge.
— Desus Nice (@desusnice) January 1, 2015
Everyone from Buzzfeed to People to Good Morning America ran stories featuring tweets similar to the one by Desus Nice. It was a joke, and most likely so were 80-90% of the tweets you read about how West was going to make the previously unknown Paul McCartney a star.
Sadly, with the 24-hour news cycle needing non-important stories to fill time and make everyone forget about Syria or Ferguson, and websites searching for page views you end up with headlines like, “Genius Alert! Kanye’s Fans Thank Him For Discovering ‘Unknown Artist’ Paul McCartney.”
The problem with this is two-fold. As a news organization, running stories like these make you look out of touch. And not just out of touch with younger generations, but out of touch with how social media and technology as a whole works in today’s society. Twitter is all about tweeting your opinion or thoughts and garnering a reaction, so joking that you don’t know who Paul McCartney is will create the desired effect if it is noticed by someone. Like reporter Roop Raj from my local Detroit Fox affiliate:
Many in their 20’s don’t know who #PaulMcCartney is. Ask yourself:did teens in 60’s know who Babe Ruth,Al Capone & Louis Armstrong were? Yep — Roop Raj (@rooprajfox2) January 5, 2015
Secondly, when a reputable news outlet runs a story on their morning news show, or on their website, most of the people who are watching or reading take this story as fact. A good number of the millions of people who watch Good Morning America now believe that a large section of the population had no idea who Paul McCartney was until five days ago, even if GMA or The Atlantic lets us know these tweets “might be jokes.”
Some of these people react by tweeting or sending messages to these Twitter comedians without understanding that it’s totally a joke. These messages aren’t usually nice. They aren’t passing along Beatles songs and telling them “it’ll change your life.” They’re closer to a WWE wrestler cutting a promo than Natalie Portman and Zach Braff talking with each other in a waiting room about The Shins.
Of course, all of this could have easily been stopped with a little bit of research from these news outlets before publishing their stories. A quick look at the timeline or Twitter bio of @DesusNice would show that he really is a comedian. Desus has a podcast and web series Desus vs. Mero produced by Complex. He’s also a pretty popular Twitter user with over 60,000 followers, and he’s been handling the extra publicity very well.
But no one seems to have done any research. It’s likely someone sent an e-mail tip to one of these outlets, probably with the subject “STUPID KIDS DON’T KNOW ABOUT PAUL MCCARTNEY,” and the intern or reporter stuck working on New Year’s weekend ran with the story without doing the tiniest amount of actual news work. I’m sure they’ll blame the hangover or the lack of editorial oversight, whichever is more plausible.
there are a bunch of adults out there who think ben franklin was a president why are we mad at people on twitter unaware of paul mccartney
— martin rickman (@martinrickman) January 3, 2015
According to Twitter, they have 284 million active users who send 500 million tweets a day, which means there are a lot of interesting opinions floating around the site every day. Don’t believe me? Here are two random searches I made while writing this piece: “Max Scherzer Astros” and “Benedict Cumberbatch Ugly.”
Most baseball fans will agree that the Houston Astros will probably not be signing free agent pitcher Max Scherzer, and my wife is honestly worried about the people who think Cumberbatch is unattractive, but I can find numerous people who think both of these things through Twitter. I’m sure you can find people who agree or disagree with every opinion you have on any given subject, even Crazy Town’s hit song “Butterfly.”
This means that while it’s either very funny or enraging for you that someone wouldn’t know Paul McCartney, there’s also not enough there to create a news story. Partly because we don’t actually know the intentions of most Twitter users, and also because it’s not news. It’s an out of touch news outlet’s sad attempt to be hip, or with the times, but in the end looking gullible because they fell for a joke someone made from their couch.
