Lots of Breaking News These Days

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Comments

[murphyluck.livejournal.com]

Perfect. We should keep the flag half staff permanently.

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Maybe we should even hang it upside down.

[murphyluck.livejournal.com]

I hear ya.

[fieryphoenix.livejournal.com]

Maybe what we need is a more flexible system that considers degrees of staff, depending on the type and severity of the tragedies, along with how many have occurred and how recent they are. The government can issue daily statements instructing us at what height to fly the flag.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Even better, the degrees of staff raising can be done individually by each person depending on his/her mood of the nation. We can then have an automated system determine the aggregate levels and calculate the mood of each flag-flying region. Perhaps then we can see which media outlets are poisoning the mood of which region, and sanction them accordingly.

I like it!

[fieryphoenix.livejournal.com]

When I run the nation, I'm appointing you Secretary of the Department of Virtuous Thought.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

With me, it's more like "Virtual." As in it looks like I'm thinking. ;-)

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

If it looks like a thought, and acts like a thought.....

[murphyluck.livejournal.com]

If that's the case I want all flagpoles motorized. Doing all that raising and lowering of the flag is going to be a lot of work.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

And graduated, with lines on the poles for ease of gradation.

[murphyluck.livejournal.com]

Excellent!

[fieryphoenix.livejournal.com]

Work is a measurable indicator of patriotism! Work makes you free!

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Flagpolen macht frei!

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Lots of news, maybe. But incidents like these statistically are on the decline. That's something the headlines never mention, strangely.

Whatever sells ads, I guess.

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Are you sure we haven't passed that point? I can't remember the last time we had two mass police-killings within a week of each other or thereabouts.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

That's kinda my point. No, neither you nor I can remember that; but that's because such killings were not in days gone by ingrained in our memories through repeated reiterations and redundancies. Back then, the cost of reporting news exceeded the revenues brought by the ads paying for the news, so stations only broadcast the FCC mandated minimum. Which meant we had maybe three national television news outlets, and only a half-hour of national news daily. The local news only covered, well, local news (duh).

Go back to the crime stats, though, and you see people were being shot daily, often in multitudes. The Eighties were a blight of this, so much so that simple shootings, often in poor neighborhoods, weren't even reported. They got relegated to the importance level of fender-benders. As long as the back-up caused didn't delay the commute, nobody bothered to report it.

I suspect the introduction of cheap but higher-quality video (from 16mm film) changed the cost dynamic around the 1980s, so more news began its creep into our lives per broadcast hour. That doesn't mean the news was any more accurate or the reporting any less bent toward what would garner increased revenues for the broadcasters. If it bleeds, it leads.

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

So, it is not that we are living in a troubled world so much as we are just the pliable consumers of evil media?

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Not evil, no. Just beholden to their bottom lines.

Think about it: 99% of telly media news is corporate, funded by commercials. It's in their best interest not to report the news "as it is"—which is impossible, sadly—but to draw viewers to their broadcasts.

In fact, only public access cable stations can claim to be non-commercial, since most public stations run "enhanced sponsorships" as a key part of their revenue modeling. So that 99% just got a few extra nines added after the decimal.

All of which means the world's troubles will be amplified. Nothing happening is simply not considered news.

Seriously, you want an example? Steven Johnson, in opening his book Future Perfect, noted that a recent two-year period experienced zero fatalities from airliner crashes. It was reported briefly in USA Today exactly once.

That is stunning news about the growing safety of air travel. And it was, completely predictably, all but ignored. Think about how a single crash is covered, even though such crashes are now anomalies to the general pattern.

[drivebyluna.livejournal.com]

Think about how a single crash is covered, even though such crashes are now anomalies to the general pattern.

Well, isn't that the point of the news? To take stock of things that are newsworthy, i.e., things that are not in the norm?

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

True enough. In the past, though, the news was limited by time. Now, a single crash can be—and frequently is—reported 24/7, creating the impression in viewers that crashes are far more frequent and/or newsworthy than they really are, ie., that they are indeed anomalous.

And in the end, the sole reason such crashes become news is simply the eye candy the provide, the scenes of destruction that need not be backed by difficult and expensive reporting. "Reporters" need only repeat press releases by the airlines and gov officials, show a repeating loop of carnage, and rake in the ad revenue generated by eyeballs glued to the mayhem. Easy Peasy.

[merig00.livejournal.com]

Well consumers also to blame. There are plenty of jokes about "local" news non-news reporting about fluff like fire department rescuing a kitten :)

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

People should never be referred to as "consumers" of news. The fact that they are, and without outward signs of irony, shows how broken our news system has become, how sold to moneyed forces, how prostituted to corporate business models.

Then again, kittens are cute.

[merig00.livejournal.com]

You are saying that as if they ever weren't sold out :D There's a reason why they say journalism is the second oldest profession.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Very much so. There's a reason Upton Sinclair titled his book on journalism The Brass Check.

[merig00.livejournal.com]

I'll just leave this here: http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/07/21/pokemon-journalist-interrupts-state-department-briefing-kirby-sot.cnn :D

[hindustar.livejournal.com]

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