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Maybe it's not just you, however I think a potential factor to give one more attention is that you can do something about the first, at least in the short term. Besides cleaning your box, you can blame Lenovo, stop buying their products, promote the boycott, etc. All things that regular people can do and serves as an anger/stress/steam release valve. The NSA news, even though it is/should be a much more important or pressing issue, it's something you "can't do anything about". I mean, ostensibly you can do a lot as a citizen, however most of those actions have long term effects and thus are not as useful as a release valve. It involves commitment and even sacrifice, whereas blaming a corporation (however righ you might be) is much more immediate and serves the purpose of having someone to blame for that and lots of other stuff, i.e. you can then blame the general state of IT security, then how the govt does nothing about it, how privay is nowadays non-existent, think of the children, etc. I also believe another factor is the way news have found a way to tap into this need for the audience to have a release valve. Something or someone to be angry at and so all your problems can be channeled to that. Where I live I've seen a growing amount of newspapers and news media that just basically do a certain journalism that does not bring anything to the table but things to be raging about. I guess it's easier to sell stuff when you can easily get people "on your side", and since there's always a lot of people angry at something, it becomes easy to have an audience. So what's the point then (from the POV of the media) of bringing "important" (for different values of important) news to the front page when that would require their audience to commit to actions that would last several years (change your country's politics for example) and thus not as easily enticed to "get on your side" (and thus buy your media), if on the other hand you could bring, I guess you could call them "anger-bait" (like click-bait) news, and have everyone talk about it by virtue of functioning as an escape valve where people relieve their stress, fear, anger, etc? I'm not saying it's a good thing, but I've seen more and more evidence that points in this direction, and I guess that would be my answer as to why one has much more attention than the other. Edit: As an analogy, I read somewhere about the recent Charlie Hebdo (sp?) attack and how it got disproportionate attention vs the two thousand killed by ISIS (I believe it was ISIS... or Borok Haram?). Maybe it's a similar thing. You believe you are able to do "more" when it's close to home (Western nation) vs far (somewhere in Africa, far away from me). |