No News As News

Are you weary of the news media sources fixating on non news, broadcasting them as news, and  then not letting go of the "story" until they achieve as much of a ratings increase as possible? Uh, as in the disappeared  Malaysian flight 3702 story. Better defined, the questions is why the world isn't instead obsessed with more important stories than that of a missing plane? CNN, for example, covered the story for a week non stop, at one point devoting 24 consecutive hours to it and reporting little else, even though information about the flight consisted of nothing more than that it was missing. For CNN speculations and guesses about the plane became "news" about it. Surely, humans have a fascination about death in sudden, large numbers. That grabs our attention. The missing airliner quenches that.

But the thirst of that kind of news seems  now to be insatiable. What should have been a prominent story for a day became a daily obsession in which media outlets speculated endlessly about it in order to create news when there was none. After we were told  that the airline was missing, we and our media should have moved on to more important issues, waiting for any real news about the plane as that information became known. Instead, the media created a kind of reality TV show about "the missing plane" in which every guess, speculation and wild theory took air time away from news that really affects our daily lives.

Curiously, the routine daily suicides and shootings and other violent deaths in the world don't seem to command our attention or even our compassion in quite the same way the plane did. Does a couple of hundred people dying in a single incident make their deaths more relevant than the thousands who die individually each day in  many other ways across the world? Apparently, in the eyes of the media "yes"....if their broadcasts can garner the ratings that satisfy the media advertisers.

Around 4,000 people worldwide died from AIDS on the same day the plane disappeared. On the day since the plane was missing,  many more thousands of people world-wide died from drug overdoses. So why don't we and the media care about those deaths as much as we do about the plane?  Perhaps it is the entertainment value of the mystery of a airplane filled with passengers that vanished. I think that it reflects that what is reported as news to day is more likely to be what entertains us rather than informs us. We tune out the important stories that "bore us" in favor of the lesser important ones that entertain us.

As sorry as I am about the deaths of those on the plane, their passing has no effect on my day to day life.  So a news story about something less glamorous that does impact me personally, say a proposal to raise my taxes,  is more important to me. Hmmmm I seem to be in the minority about that felling. Finding a news story with real relevance is a whole lot more difficult than a missing plane report. The problem with our always-on culture today is that actually, we're not always focused on stuff that matters, just stuff that triggers our emotions or entertains us. It is a pity and a reflection of the dumbing down of society.

Too, the prevalence of our electronic gadgets and the rise of social media seems to be making the problem even worse, since it is fragmenting our attention down to the individual level and is causing us to be less a society and more an individual voyeur. Sigh....the good news is that stories like the missing plane eventually die from overexposure. And the bad news? It's that another one will surely take it's place and distract us from knowing what we should rather than what titillates us. Maybe the world is now more like reality TV than reality itself.