The Shallowness Trap
There’s this thing happening with young journalists right now where everyone’s desperately trying to seem cool and irreverent and in touch with what matters. They finish school, they get a byline somewhere online, and suddenly they’re convinced they’re revolutionizing media. They drink artisanal coffee, share ironic memes in group chats, and write listicles about whether you’re smart enough to know basic facts. The whole thing is exhausting to watch.
Bento was the perfect symbol of this. It was what you got when you blended SPIEGEL’s institutional confidence with BuzzFeed’s clickbait energy and threw in the lowest-common-denominator stupidity of a reality TV show. The outlet was ostensibly about speaking to young Germans, but what it actually did was treat its audience like they were dumber than they were. Quiz after quiz, ranking after ranking, each piece designed to be shareable and meaningless in equal measure. It wasn’t journalism that happened to be young. It was youth as a brand applied to journalism.
Jan Böhmermann, who’s been doing satirical takedowns longer than most of these writers have been alive, spent about twenty minutes dismantling Bento on air. Not with anger, which would’ve been too easy, but with the kind of patient contempt you reserve for something that’s so fundamentally confused about what it’s trying to do that you almost feel bad. Almost. The questions Bento asked its readers were genuinely depressing—not because they were too hard, but because they were insulting in their simplicity. Do you know what seasons are? Can you spell basic words? It was patronizing dressed up as relatability.
What stuck with me wasn’t the takedown itself. It was the reminder that trying this hard to seem effortless always shows. You can feel the effort underneath. Real cool doesn’t announce itself or chase metrics or calculate how many shares something will get. It just exists. Bento cared too much about being liked by the right people at the right moment, and that’s the death of anything that might have been genuinely interesting.