Thoughts at the office

[dorchadas]

Reading ntcoolfool's journal, and especially some of the comments that media people left seeking interviews, got me thinking.

A lot of people complain that during tragedies, the media are vultures. And some of those entries are pretty bad...not the entries themselves, but after he posts how the VT massacre affects him, he gets anonymous comments like "Hi, I'm from the CBC, call me." There's only a couple problems: A) all media outfits are businesses these days, and are run with an eye towards profit and B) horrible tragedies on page one sell by far the most copy.

People complain that "the media only reports on bad news!" Well, hell yeah we do. If we write about firefighters pulling kittens out of trees no one reads it. These are things people want to know. Every media source thinks: "If we don't report on them, people will go to other sources that do." It's the same problem with 24-hour news channels. Even though usually there's nothing to say, you have to be saying something, or the viewers will go to the competition.

Also on the subject of the media...a glorious, stirring eulogy for Kurt Vonnegut. Classy, FauxFox News. Classy.

Comments

[jdcohen.livejournal.com]

Oh my Lord... that obituary wasn't just snarky and circuitously mean, they were fucking outright, in-your-face BRUTAL. "Oh, and did we mention he attempted suicide and FAILED??!?" Fucking Fox News.

Oh, and the whole Virginia Tech thing is really nuts down here. I talked to a few friends of mine who went to VA Tech (one of whom only went there a year until she transferred), and it's really got them confused and off-balance. Of course, now the nation can start being afraid of immigrants of all shapes and sizes (because, obviously, they are ALL terrorists) instead of, you know, doing the obvious thing and beefing up Virginia's gun laws.

--Jeff

[schoolpsychnerd]

I was actually talking about that with one of my professors. While I can crouch it in psych terms, it still doesn't make sense on any real logical level why death experiences make people objectify those with different beliefs or from different cultures. As much as I want to say that people are good but they do really shitty things, the world kind of makes it hard for me to do that.