I’m Not Dead. I Feel Fine. I Don’t Want To Go In The Cart. I Feel Happy. I Feel Happy.

I’m beginning to think that this Will Ferrell hoax is a setup. Not on the part of Ferrell but as a method of discrediting the Internet as a source of news.

Newspapers are all tanking due to competition with the new electronic media. Unfortunately Internet versions of subscription newspapers can’t make any money. There are too many that were free in the beginning and now like running water in Bolivia, no one wants to pay for it when it was provided gratis for so long. Geographic lines are no longer a barrier to the reader so when they do charge there will be no reason for me to pay for The Boston Globe if I can read all the AP wire stuff on Yahoo. Sure I miss out on the local or metro section but there are other sites that do a decent job of providing regional coverage. Also, I don’t want to read the news a day late now that I’m used to instant information.

So then you can see how threatened dead tree publishing is. It would be in their best interest to throw some monkeys into the wrenches and show how easy and fast a hoax can spread. I found the story on one of the news aggregators that I frequent shortly after it was posted and thought how strange as I was just thinking about Will Ferrell the day before. So I linked to it. Now I know my 30 readers aren’t going to be enough to support me as I start some publishing revolution, but unless I pull my posting it will eventually hit the search engines and come up when people search for ‘Will Ferrell Dead’. I’ll be forever linked to as that guy who wants Jake Gyllenhaal dead. (Really I don’t want him dead. I’m just sick of hearing about some lagging ‘B list’ actor who managed to get his ‘Q Rating’ up by taking such an obviously calculated career move. I could just as easily have picked Joshua Jackson, hell Hollywood is full of actors in the process of washing out. You pick one.)

Another theory could be that the hoax was perpetrated as the first step toward enacting legislation locking down the only free press that can do serious national and international damage to our increasingly totalitarian government. After all, congress is trying to sneak in a law penalizing reporters who report legitimate news against the presidents wishes. With TV, radio and print media all merged and owned by a tiny handful of powerful friends of the president, the Internet is now the only counter source of news. It’s the only thing forcing the mainstream media to acknowledge and report on real controversies. It will only be a matter of time before the Internet becomes the sole challenge to the Oval Office’s totalitarian control of all reporting media. Take a look at China with how oppressive the official news is and their efforts to keep international dissent from reaching their citizenry. Our own government has every reason to fear bad publicity, remember it was the fax machine that brought down the Soviet Union. Cell phones and text messaging helped the Muslim underclass organize a national revolt in France and Australia this past summer. It will be electronic media that helps organize the next American Revolution. Consider your camera phone to be the new ‘Liberty Tree’ (just don’t forget to take out the battery when trying to hide.)

It makes perfect sense to me that during the run up to grab away our freedom the government needs a scandal to point their vulgar little fingers at so that the (unfortunately) less astute majority will shout out a resounding ‘Yes, show that Internet who’s boss! We can’t have phony news reports showing up on the computers that most of us don’t understand how to use.’ It’s not like if we wait a while the truth doesn’t arrive just as quickly. That system can’t be any worse then the official daily publication and smearing of lies and propaganda that the mainstream media broadcasts continuously and then quietly ‘corrects’ at 3am on Sunday, once, never to be mentioned again.