| "I'm left with opinion on those days that not much of anything has happened regarding X. But folks still need views!" In a strange way it validates how well off we are, particularly in the U.S., that outrage needs to be manufactured in this way. Of course the impacts are extremely negative and no journalist ever gets views or prizes for "hey it is important but society won't collapse and we are pretty well off..." In the end it is a number of factors and cycles between the public and the media: 1) News is now a entertainment with eyes to attract. 2) The public loves death, destruction and crisis. "We like to watch things die from a safe distance; better you than us." 3) Journalists don't get any personal or professional benefit from covering important but "mundane" things. Look at who wins the Pulitzer. 4) On an individual level, people will still find things that are problematic regardless of how well off they are (see "First-World" problems). 5) Knowing of 4) there is a typical over-reaction to actual things of importance; but the reaction is hysterical. "A kid was kidnapped today, that could happen to mine!" 6) Now that every individual, isolated event can be distributed to millions; every single crisis abstracted to be systematic and endemic (based on 4) and 5) above); it is not that bad things happen, it is that there needs to be a solution and we need to solve for it. "We've got to do something about this kidnapping crisis, I see it on the news all the time!" 7) Realizing 6) the media can now take political positions and feed into this need to produce more stories that satiate that. A year later...parents are charged with neglect after letting their kids walk home from school alone.
Turns out it was a relative who kidnapped the kid.
Also turns out there were only 10 of these this year in your community and the chances of this are much smaller than they were years ago, but all of them hit the news, so... |
The internet has made everybody a brand. Reporters are learning to be brands instead of data sources.