The Misguidance Of Clark Kent

Bryan O'Nolan

Bryan O'Nolan is the the most highly paid investigative reporter at Ordinary Times. He lives in New Hampshire. He is available for effusive praise on Twitter. He can be contacted with thoughtfully couched criticism via email. His short story collection Mike Pence & Me is currently available from Amazon.

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6 Responses

  1. J_A says:

    Unlike the Pence ones, this one made me laugh out loud. Congrats

    Double congrats for referring to steel as an alloy, which, of course it is. But people rarely say it out loud.

    And, sorry, I still don’t get the Pence stories, and still intensely dislike your chosen hero. If they are a roman à clef, I desperately need a locksmith.Report

    • Bryan O'Nolan in reply to J_A says:

      Hey, no worries. it’s about him because it’s really not about a person, but all the things we all think we know about a public figure, and how reality often doesn’t match in the way we;d expect, and that that’s okay. But I got a laugh out of you, so I’m happy!Report

  2. North says:

    This was extraordinarily clever, well done!Report

  3. DavidTC says:

    I actually was thinking about this the other day.

    The justification in the comics for Clark being a reporter is that he can learn about dangerous situations before anyone else, which…doesn’t actually work anymore. The way to learn about dangerous situations would be to…follow twitter.

    And the idea was he’d get _assigned_ to those dangerous situation, which…a really good way for a newspaper to get sued. ‘Hey, we’re got a line on an underground fighting ring, you go check it out, random reporter who isn’t Clark Kent?’ and then three days later that reporter is laying in a hospital bed filing a lawsuit. Granted, Lois Lane seems to be doing dangerous assignments all the time…but it’s clearly implied she just doing that because she wants to, not because anyone’s telling her to. In fact, people are often telling her not to.

    And as the TV show Supergirl has pointed out…Clark would have trouble even _running articles_ about things. On that show, Kara as Supergirl discovered a plot to round up aliens while working for the government, and wanted to run an article about it…and her editor wouldn’t let her, because she basically had no sources. Even when she tried to cite Supergirl (Which she actually does a lot), this time her editor pointed out that this wasn’t something Supergirl had observed either, and was like ‘And who are _Supergirl’s_ sources?’…which was a secret government organization she couldn’t tell anyone about.

    Reporters can’t just write things because they ‘know’ them.Report