The "Who Is Paul McCartney?" Meme Is Now Infecting TV News 

So on New Year's Eve, Kanye West released "Only One," a lovely little electric-piano jam about his daughter, as seen through the eyes of his dearly departed mother. It's pretty sweet! It was also tagged "featuring Paul McCartney," which has compelled Twitter to bug the fuck out, and now compelled TV news people to bug the fuck out while reporting that Twitter has bugged the fuck out.

Here is the crux of the problem:

That's Desus as in Desus vs. Mero, the indispensable podcast and burgeoning comedy juggernaut, and he is making a joke. He is pretending not to know who Paul McCartney is. Many people on Twitter made a joke along these lines; a much smaller subset of young people on Twitter actually don't know who Sir Paul is and had the temerity to say so, and these poor souls were in turn mocked by old, dying, joyless people aghast that the youth of today are not up on the Beatles, but to repeat: Roughly 97 percent of these people are putting you on.

Cue the incredulous local-TV-news coverage anyway, because Jesus. Above, please find a nice lady in Cincinnati whose job it is to read tweets on television while gently smirking; I love that this is tagged "NEW INFORMATION." She is hedging like crazy ("That one perhaps was a bit tongue in cheek"), but she persists in reading/smirking anyway, concluding with "It's Twitter. It's not all real." But if she's gonna win a Pulitzer off this, she has stiff competition from the boys out at WCNC in Charlotte:

"Poor folks. They just don't know any better." Good Morning America is now in the act as well. This is why the internet can't have nice things.