On a day when 55 people were killed by bombs in Iraq, the most read story on BBC news was news of a duck who survived gunshot wounds and two days in the fridge.
The story was more popular than Hillary Clinton’s announcement to run for President in 2008, the 200-tonne oil leak from a beached ship.
Visitors to the site were also more interested about Big Brother, and a man surviving 17-storey stumble.
The Big Brother news topped the charts for five days out of the last seven, with the duck with nine lives, and the storm that killed nine people in Britain taking the top spot on the remaining days.
There has been a lot of criticism about social news aggregation sites such as Digg and Reddit promoting sensationalist fare while causing news of profound events that shape the world disappear into the ether.
But BBC statistics prove that even if one offers news that matters on the front page, the readers will always go for the articles that appeal to them most.
John C. Sommerville in his 1999 How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society argued that we made the news dumber by demanding it round the clock.
Millions of column inches and airtime hours must be filled with information, every day, every hour, every minute, and Sommerville says that news becomes the driving force for much of our public culture.
It is a vicious cycle: News becomes dumber because we want more, and then we get addicted to dumb news, and demand more of it.
The day ducks stop grabbing the headlines, the pigs will start flying.
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