You know, it occurs to me that the known internet phenomenon of Reddit âam I the asshole?â posts having completely misleading headers is actually a really great example of a far less known but far more common practice of extreme journalistic spin in cases where there are large monetary incentives to diminish the story in question.
Like, if you see a Reddit post titled âAm I the asshole for buying my wife a new dress?â, the post is pretty much always something totally deranged like: âI (48) really dislike the way my wife (20) dresses, because I think itâs too revealing and makes her look slutty, which was fine when we started dating five years ago, but it makes me feel like sheâs going to cheat on me now that weâre married. Iâve politely asked her to get new clothes multiple times, and every time she refused because she said she liked her clothes, and didnât want to waste money buying new ones. Yesterday I couldnât take it anymore so I threw out a bunch of her old dresses and bought her a new one that was more modest looking. She started crying because one of the dresses I threw out had been left to her by her mom who died when she was a teen, but I couldnât have known that it had sentimental value. She said that I should have asked, but obviously if I asked sheâd have just told me not to throw out any of her clothes, including the ones that werenât sentimental. Also, the more modest dress I bought was pretty expensive, and she never thanked me for it. Am I the asshole here, or is she being unreasonable?â
Similarly, whenever you see a headline like âWoman Wins Millions From McDonaldâs Because Her Hot Coffee Was Too Hotâ, if you dig a bit, youâll almost always quickly find out that what actually happened was: A 79-year-old ordered coffee which, unbeknownst to her, was being served extremely dangerously hot, because McDonaldâs was trying to have coffee that stayed warm over a long commute without spending any extra money on cups with better insulation. The coffee spilled on the old womanâs lap, giving her severe third degree burns over a huge portion of her body, including her genitals. She got to a hospital and they managed to save her life with skin grafting, but she became disabled from the accident, and her genitals and thighs were permanently disfigured. She tried to settle with McDonaldâs for her medical costs, and McDonaldâs refused to cover any portion of her medical expenses at all, and so she sued. At trial, the jury discovered that this same exact thing had happened seven hundred times before, and McDonaldâs had still decided not to change their policy because paying out individual suits was cheaper than moderately reducing their coffee profits. As a result, the jury awarded punitive damages designed to penalize McDonaldâs two days worth of their coffee profits, in addition to the womanâs medical costs.
I think itâs largely the same phenomenon, but I know a lot of people who are familiar with the first case, but donât know to look for the second. If you see some totally outrageous âhow could a person ever sue over this stupid thing?â case, you should immediately be incredibly suspicious that thatâs all that actually happened, because a lot of the time, it absolutely isnât. The people who have the most incentive to make their opponent look not only wrong, but completely crazy for having any sort of grievance at all, are often the actually unreasonable ones.Â
Anyway this is all to say that if I see ANY of yâall automatically siding with McDonaldâs over the recent case where 4-year-old girl was severely burned by their chicken nuggets because âhurr durr dumb kid didnât know that chicken nuggets were hot, people sue over anything lolâ, I will grab that McBoot youâre licking and shove it all the way up your McFuckingAss.
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